Best known for his poetry, Donald Justice also wrote plays, short stories, critical essays, reviews, and the libretto for Edward J. Miller’s opera The Young God. His stories “The Lady” and “Vineland’s Burning,” first published in Western Review, were included in the O. Henry Awards Prize Stories of 1950 and 1954. Both portray characters who are locked inside themselves; like a number of Justice’s poems, these stories discover the humanity of people who might be overlooked as uninteresting or dismissed as insane. The nonfiction Platonic Scripts (1984) is a collection of essays and interviews; Justice’s criticism and reviews demonstrate the same concern for craftsmanship that characterizes his own poetry and fiction.

Donald Justice started collecting literary awards after the publication of his first book, The Summer Anniversaries, which won the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1959. He went on to win the Inez Boulton Prize from Poetry magazine in 1960, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1980 for Selected Poems, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974, the Harriet Monroe Award from the University of Chicago in 1984, a Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996. He received a National Book Award nomination in 1973 for Departures and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination in 1988 for The Sunset Maker. He became an Academy of American Poets fellow in 1988. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992 and served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. Among his other honors are grants in poetry from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and a grant in theater from the Ford Foundation.