Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah
Born	April 23, 1942
Died	March 1, 2010 (aged 67)
Occupation	Writer, Professor
Genre	Literature

Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. In his lifetime he was awarded the The Faulkner Prize (1972), The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction, The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award, the PEN/Malamud Award (2003) and the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of natural causes.

Biography

Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi and raised in Clinton Mississippi. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mississippi College in 1964. He spent the next three years at the University of Arkansas, where he earned a Master of Arts in 1966 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1967.

Hannah's first novel, the grotesque coming-of-age tale Geronimo Rex (1972), won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. Nightwatchmen (1973), his second novel, was a difficult book, and it is his only work never reissued in paperback. Hannah returned to form, however, with the short-story collection Airships (1978), which today is considered a classic. Most of the stories in the volume were first published in Esquire magazine by its fiction editor at the time, Gordon Lish. The short novel Ray (1980) was a critical success and a minor breakthrough for Hannah, and it is still considered one of his best novels. After the grotesque Western pastiche Never Die (1991), Hannah stuck to the short story form for the rest of the decade, first with the immense Bats Out of Hell (1993), which featured twenty-three stories over close to four hundred pages, making it Hannah's longest book, and then with High Lonesome (1996), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. After a near-fatal bout with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hannah returned in 2001 with Yonder Stands Your Orphan (the title is taken from Bob Dylan's song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"), his longest novel since Geronimo Rex. In this novel, Hannah returned to a small community north of Vicksburg and to some of the characters featured in stories from Airships and Bats Out of Hell.

Hannah finished a new novel, which underwent several title changes. In a 2003 interview with the Austin Chronicle, Hannah declared the novel to be called Last Days. A 2005 interview with Hannah in The Paris Review featured a manuscript page from the then-titled Long, Last, Happy. However, a 2009 issue of the literary journal Gulf Coast featured an excerpt from the novel, then titled Sick Soldier at Your Door. The same excerpt was printed in the June 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine. A subsequent interview with Tom Franklin in the Summer 2009 issue of Tin House revealed that Sick Soldier at Your Door had been reconceptualized as a collection of short stories.

Hannah taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Clemson University, Middlebury College, the University of Alabama, Texas State University, and the University of Memphis.

He served as the director of the MFA program in creative writing for prose fiction at the University of Mississippi. Hannah was a frequent visiting writer at the summer creative writing seminars at Sewanee and Bennington.

Hannah died in Oxford, Mississippi, on March 1, 2010 at the age of 67.

Works

Novels

• Geronimo Rex (1972)
• Nightwatchmen (1973)
• Ray (1980)
• The Tennis Handsome (1983)
• Hey Jack! (1987)
• Boomerang (1989)
• Never Die (1991)
• Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)

Story collections

• Airships (1978)
• Captain Maximus (1985)
• Bats out of Hell (1993)
• High Lonesome (1996)
• Sick Soldier at Your Door (2010)

Awards

• The William Faulkner Prize
• The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction
• The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award
• The Award for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

External Links/Webliography

• Barry Hannah at the Mississippi Writers Page
• "Southern Destroyer" in Austin Chronicle
• Paris Review interview with Barry Hannah, 2004
• Perspectives on Barry Hannah Edited by Martyn Bone
• "Barry Hannah's Long Shadow" by Wells Tower
• Wired For Books Audio Interview with Barry Hannah
• GuardianUK obituary, March 2, 2010
• "Testimony of Pilot" by Barry Hannah
• R. Vanarsdall, "The Spirits Will Win Through: An Interview with Barry Hannah," Southern Review 19:22, 317-341, 1983.