Stanton Garner (1925-2011)

Stanton Garner (1925–2011) GEORGE, EDWARD, AND STANTON GARNER, JR. San Marcos, TX S tanton Garner, age 86, died November 20, 2011 at his home in San Marcos, Texas following a lengthy illness. He was born September 1, 1925 in Corning, New York to the late Helen and Edward Garner, and attended Corning Free Academy through high school. In 1943 he graduated from the Manlius School in DeWitt, New York and in the fall of that year entered the Army Air Corps Aviation Cadet program. Stan later matriculated to the U.S. Naval Academy after having received commissions to attend both West Point and Annapolis. He graduated in the class of 1948 and began a career in the United States Navy. He served in the Korean Conflict aboard the destroyers USS Hanson and USS Melvin. After the war, Stanton attended submarine school and served on the submarines USS Hardhead and USS Lionfish. He retired from the Naval Reserves as a full Commander in 1973. Few things gave him more pleasure than watching Navy beat Army in their annual football clash. According to his 1948 Naval Academy yearbook, Stan devoted a large portion of his career at Annapolis to “the advancement of culture in c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 43 I N M E M O R I A M the military organization particularly in the field of musical and literary appreciation.” A lover of music, he was an accomplished trumpeter, playing in swing bands at home and getting in trouble once for doing so on shore leave in the Mediterranean. He loved literature, as well, and in his thirties decided to make his career as a literary scholar. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 1963 with a specialty in nineteenth-century American literature and taught there for a brief period as a member of the faculty. He spent the 1968–69 academic year teaching in Brazil on the first of two Fulbright Fellowships there and, upon his return, accepted a job as department head at the University of Texas, Arlington in 1970. In 1979–80 he returned to the Naval Academy as a visiting professor and, after retiring from UT-Arlington, taught in Portugal on another Fulbright in 1988. He finished his career as a visiting professor at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University). Over the course of his career, Stan published numerous books and articles on Harold Frederic, Herman Melville, and other nineteenth-century American authors. In 1969 he published The Captain’s Best Mate, an edition of the journal kept by Mary Chipman Lawrence, wife of Captain Samuel Lawrence, aboard the whaler Addison in 1856–60. The same year saw the publication of his Harold Frederic in the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers series, and over the next fifteen years he worked as General Editor of the Harold Frederic Edition, which made available a wide range of Frederic’s letters and works, some unknown and almost all out of general circulation. His great passion, though, was Melville—another man of the sea—and as early as the 1970s he began researching and publishing articles that would form the basis of The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), a major study of Melville’s later poetry and of the writer’s complex attitudes toward the American Civil War. Traveling across the country in a 1967 Chevy Nova that had belonged to his parents, he conducted the extensive research for this book at military and other archives in the Midwest and Northeast. Stan’s final book, which he wrote in retirement, was The Two Intertwined Narratives in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd: A Study of an Author’s Literary Method (2010). Stan served as Secretary of the Melville Society from 1990–1993 and President in 1995. He was deeply committed to the Society and loved the opportunity to see his colleagues at the MLA Convention. Stan survived the passing of his beloved...