Barry Hannah

Template:Short description Template:Infobox writer Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.<ref>Obituary The New York Times. March 3, 2010. page A27.</ref><ref name="latimesobit">Kellogg, Carolyn (March 2, 2010). "Author Barry Hannah, 67, has died". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved May 18, 2013.</ref> Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections.<ref name="OxfordConference">Template:Cite web</ref>

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), was nominated for the National Book Award. Airships, his 1978 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the American Civil War, and the modern South, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The following year, Hannah received the prestigious Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hannah won a Guggenheim, the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.<ref name="OxfordConference"/>

Hannah was twice the recipient of a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction and received Mississippi's prestigious Governor's Award in 1989 for distinguished representation of the state of Mississippi in artistic and cultural matters. For a brief time Hannah lived in Los Angeles and worked as a writer for the film director Robert Altman.<ref name="latimesobit" /> He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of a heart attack.<ref name="PettusAP">Pettus, Emily Wagster (March 2, 2010). "Author Barry Hannah dies at 67 in Mississippi". Associated Press. The Guardian. Retrieved May 18, 2013.</ref>

Early life

Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He had three children, a daughter Lee and two sons, Barry Jr. and Ted. He was married three times, the last to Susan (Varas) Hannah (1946–2010).<ref name="nytobit">Grimes, William (March 3, 2010). "Barry Hannah, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 67". The New York Times. Retrieved May 18, 2013.</ref>

Education

At Mississippi College, Hannah majored in pre-med but later switched to literature.<ref>Smith, Kayla (April 23, 2013). "Have You Heard of Barry Hannah?". Deep South Magazine. Retrieved May 18, 2013.</ref> He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mississippi College in Clinton in 1964.<ref name="nytobit" /> 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.<ref name="nytobit" />

Writing

Barry Hannah's fictions contain situational humor that spans a wide gamut, from the surreal to grotesque and black humor.<ref>Weston, Ruth D. (1998). Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic. p. 106. quote: "The complex nature of Barry Hannah's humor has deep roots in these American literary traditions, to which he brings his unique comic vision. the situational humor in his fiction, which runs the gamut from slapstick burlesque to parody and the absurd and from the malappropriate to the Gothic grotesque and macabre,"</ref> His first publication was a story that was placed in a national anthology of the best college writing when he was a student at the University of Arkansas. Soon after that, Hannah wrote "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt": Template:Quote

Hannah's first novel, the grotesque coming-of-age tale Geronimo Rex (1972), was nominated for the National Book Award.<ref name="PettusAP" /> Nightwatchmen (1973), his second novel, was a difficult book, and it is his only work never to be reissued in paperback.<ref>Wright, Snowden (April 10, 2013). "Barry Hannah's 'Lost' Novel". The Millions. Retrieved May 19, 2013.</ref> Hannah returned to form, however, with the short-story collection Airships (1978). Most of the stories in the volume were first published in Esquire magazine by its fiction editor at the time, Gordon Lish.<ref name="nytobit" /> The short novel Ray (1980) was a critical success and a minor breakthrough for Hannah, and one of his best-known novels.<ref>Ellis, Lee (March 3, 2010). "Sabers, Gentlemen: Remembering Barry Hannah". The New Yorker. Retrieved May 19, 2013.</ref>

After the grotesque Western pastiche Never Die (1991),<ref>Turner, Daniel (2012). Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South. University of Tennessee Press. Template:ISBN. p. 202.</ref> Hannah stuck to short stories for the rest of the decade, first with the immense Bats Out of Hell (1993), which featured 23 stories over close to 400 pages, making it Hannah's longest book, and then with High Lonesome (1996), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.<ref name="latimesobit" /> After a near-fatal bout with non-Hodgkin lymphoma,<ref>Howorth, Richard (March 15, 2010). "Barry Hannah". Time. Retrieved May 19, 2013.</ref> 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.<ref>Bernstein, Richard (July 10, 2001). "Books of the Times; Giving In to the Urge To Do Bad in the South". The New York Times. Retrieved May 19, 2013.</ref><ref>Bjerre, Thomas (2007). "Heroism and the Changing Face of American Manhood in Barry Hannah's Fiction" in Bone, Martin (ed) Perspectives on Barry Hannah. University Press of Mississippi, Template:ISBN. p. 60.</ref>

Hannah attempted one more novel, which underwent several title changes. In a 2003 interview with the Austin Chronicle, Hannah called it Last Days. A 2005 interview with Hannah in The Paris Review featured a manuscript page from the then-titled Long, Last, Happy.Template:Citation needed Then a 2009 issue of the literary journal Gulf Coast featured an excerpt from the novel, titled Sick Soldier at Your Door.<ref>Hannah, Barry (2009). An excerpt from "Sick Soldier at Your Door". Gulf Coast. 21:1. Retrieved May 19, 2013.</ref> The same excerpt was printed in the June 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine.<ref>Hannah, Barry (2009). "Sick soldier at your door". Harper's Magazine. Retrieved May 19, 2013.</ref> A subsequent interview with Tom Franklin in the Summer 2009 issue of Tin House revealed that Sick Soldier at Your Door had been reconceived as a collection of short stories.<ref>Franklin, Tom (March 2, 2010). "Barry Hannah, 1942-2010". Tin House. Retrieved May 19, 2013. Archived from the original on December 9, 2011.</ref> The stories were published in November 2011 by Grove Press under the title Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Teaching

Hannah taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Clemson University, Bennington College, Middlebury College, the University of Alabama, Texas State University, and the University of Montana - Missoula.<ref name="nytobit" /><ref>Cobb, Mark Hughes (September 25, 2008). "Noted writer Barry Hannah returns to UA". The Tuscaloosa News. Retrieved May 18, 2013.</ref><ref>Wilkes, Byron (March 7, 2010). "Hannah and his works will long be remembered". The Meridian Star. Retrieved May 18, 2013.</ref> He was a frequent visiting writer at the summer creative writing seminars at Sewanee.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Hannah was the director of the M.F.A. program at the University of Mississippi, where he was known as a "generous mentor".<ref name="starnewsobit">Template:Cite news</ref> Early during his tenure at the University of Mississippi, he came to class drunk and was known for "drinking heavily".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His students included Larry Brown, Bob Shacochis, Donna Tartt and Wells Tower.<ref name="nytobit" /><ref name="starnewsobit" />

Death

Hannah died of a heart attack<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> in Oxford, Mississippi, on March 1, 2010, at the age of 67.<ref name="PettusAP"/> His death was just days before the 17th annual Oxford Conference for the Book, held in his hometown. Hannah and his work were the focus of that year's conference.<ref name="OxfordConference"/>

Awards

• The William Faulkner Prize, given by the University of Rennes
• The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction
• The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award
• The Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• The PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction
• Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1983)

Publications

Novels

• Geronimo Rex (1972)
• Night-Watchmen (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)
• Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories (Nov. 2010)

Essays

• "Memories of Tennessee Williams", Mississippi Review, Vol. 48, 1995.
• "Introduction" The Book of Mark, Pocket Canon, Grove-Atlantic, 1999.

External links

• Template:Cite journal
• Southern Destroyer in Austin Chronicle
• Writers Remember Barry Hannah by Claire Howorth
• Barry Hannah's Long Shadow by Wells Tower
• Kim Herzinger, "On the New Fiction" Mississippi Review, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 7–22.
• Literary Mourning: Thoughts on Barry Hannah