George Garrett (1929–2008) was the author of thirty-five books, including novels, short story collections, poetry collections, essay collections, screenplays, and plays. His most recent publications were Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life (Texas Review Books, 2002), essays; A Story Goes With It (Five and Ten Press, 2004), a novella; Double Vision (University of Alabama Press, 2004), a novel; and Empty Bed Blues (University of Missouri Press, 2006), stories. He was most widely recognized, however, for his trilogy of historical novels, Death of the Fox (1971), The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James (1983), and Entered from the Sun (1990), all published by Doubleday. His eighth collection of poems, Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1997.

Garrett received his PhD from Princeton and holds an honorary degree from the University of the South. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Sabbatical Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant. Other honors and awards included the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Sewanee Review Fellowship in Poetry, the T.S. Eliot Award of the Ingersoll Foundation, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the PEN Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Commonwealth of Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts. He taught at the University of Michigan, Bennington College, Princeton University, Hollins College, and retired as the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. He also served as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia.