Captain Norton R. Girault, United States Navy, was the son of the late John Francis Girault and Virginia Marshall Girault of Louisiana. A native of New Orleans, Norton served a distinguished career on active duty in the United States Navy and was a long-time and highly respected member of the Hampton Roads and Bread Loaf literary communities. Norton graduated from LSU where he studied under the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, a collaboration that would lead to a deep friendship and propel Norton’s lifelong commitment to the literary arts. After service as a communications officer in combat aboard ships in the Atlantic and the Pacific during World War II, he was awarded a graduate fellowship at the University of Minnesota where he studied until he accepted a commission in the regular Navy.
Norton would serve a total of twenty-eight years on active duty during World War II and the Korean conflict.
Upon his retirement from active duty in 1969, Norton returned to his literary roots and taught for over fourteen years as an assistant professor of English at Norfolk State University. Throughout his life, Norton loved writers and writing and maintained a robust correspondence with a wide network of literary friends and associates. He was a regular and beloved presence at the Bread Loaf Writer’s conference in Middlebury, Vermont where he studied with some of the best writers of the day including John Irving, John Gardner, Tony Morrison and many others. Norton’s short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry was published widely in literary journals and his debut short story collection, Out Among the Rooster Men was published in 2012 when he was 93 years old. Also in 2012, Old Dominion University and Barely South Review initiated the annual Norton Girault Literary Prize in recognition of Norton’s commitment to the literary arts and his contribution to the Newport News literary community. In 2015, Norton was awarded a John Gardner Fellowship in recognition of literary excellence by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was also awarded the Virginia Commission for the Arts individual artist prize for fiction. Norton never ceased his daily work on the page. He completed a novel, Andre Boulanger, about New Orleans one month before his death.
