[2] Garrigue moved to New York City and spent most of her life in Manhattan,[3] aside from her teaching engagements and travels throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

[3] She died at the Massachusetts General Hospital on December 27, 1972; her funeral was held at the Appleton chapel of Memorial Church at Harvard University.

[3] Garrigue claimed Chopin, Keats, and Proust as early influences and she admired the English poets Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and W. B.

[2] Garrigue was first published in 1941 by The Kenyon Review[2] while she worked for Collier's as a researcher, edited a United States Organizations (U.S.O.)

publication during World War II, and served as an assistant editor of an aeronautical magazine, The Flying Cadet.

[1] Garrigue received awards for her works; The Kenyon Review awarded her two of their first prizes, one for a 1944 short story and the other for her 1966 novella The Animal Hotel, which George Plimpton claims[10] was based on people Herbst met while staying at the Hotel Helvetia in Paris but was more likely based on Garrigue's stays at Erwinna with Herbst.

[11] She was also awarded and honored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Museum, National Academy of Arts and Letters, The Hudson Review, and Radcliffe Institute.

Along with teaching, Garrigue was poet-in-residence for several institutions, including the University of California, Riverside, where she was resident in the Spring of 1972; she taught at Rhode Island College that fall until her health entered terminal decline.

[14] Of the intensity and challenging nature of her poems, Randall Jarrell said that her work had "the guaranteeing and personal queerness of a diary," and many others have remarked on its uniqueness and strangeness.