Thomas Burnett Swann

Most of Swann's fiction was outright fantasy. The early story "The Dryad-tree" is set in contemporary Florida and features a woman's reaction to the knowledge that her new husband's garden contains a tree possessed by a jealous dryad. The story was adapted as a short film in 2017.

The three novels were collected as The Minotaur Trilogy (1997)

Swann died of cancer in 1976. Several of his novels were published posthumously.

The most openly homosexual relationship in Swann's stories is also the most controversial. His novel How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974) depicts the Biblical Jonathan and David as lovers, and furthermore suggests that Jonathan was himself a member of an ancient winged half-human race. The book appeared from Swann's regular publisher DAW Books, but only after DAW's founder and chief executive Donald A. Wollheim fought to prevent distributor New American Library from banning it. However, Swann was reportedly unhappy with George Barr's cover artwork, which showed two of the characters being chased by a cyclops, because he felt it misrepresented the style of the novel.

Poets also frequently appear as characters in his novels, always on the side of good: Sappho in Wolfwinter (1972); Robert Herrick in Will-o-the-Wisp (1977, serialized 1974); a fictionalized Charles Sorley in The Goat Without Horns (1971); and Thomas Chatterton in The Not-World (1975).

Swann began writing fiction in 1958 with "Winged Victory", a science fiction story based on the famous headless statue known as the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In Swann's story the statue's head is discovered and found to have been modeled upon an alien visitor whom the sculptor took for a goddess.

Thomas Burnett Swann (October 12, 1928 - May 5, 1976) was an American poet, critic and fantasy author.