Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah
Born	(1942-04-23)April 23, 1942 Meridian, Mississippi, USA
Died	March 1, 2010(2010-03-01) (aged 67) Oxford, Mississippi, USA
Occupation	short story writer, novelist, professor
Period	1965–2010
Genre	short story, novel

Howard Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.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.

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. Airships, his 1978 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the 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.

He was awarded the Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters twice 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 in 1980, Hannah lived in Los Angeles and worked as a writer for the film director Robert Altman. 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 alcoholism.

"Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word. But he seemed to command the short story form and the novel form and make those forms up newly for himself."

Richard Ford

Barry Hannah's fictions contains situational humor that spawns a large gamut, from the Surreal humour to the grotesque and black humor. 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 this, Hannah says he wrote his first truly good story, "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt,":

And then I wrote my first truly good story, "Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt," which was a piece of my then-forthcoming book, Geronimo Rex. I was about twenty-three. It really lit up for me, I thought. I don't really care what folks think of it now, but "Mother Rooney" was a springboard to the rest of my creative life.

New stories were scheduled to be published in November 2010 by Grove Press under the title Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories. According to Grove's website, the book will "the best of the four story collections [Hannah] published during his lifetime and the final manuscript he left behind."

Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program. Among the Mississippi writers whose careers he helped foster were the firefighter-novelist Larry Brown (”Dirty Work,” “Joe,” “Father and Son,” “Big Bad Love,” ) and Donna Tartt (”The Secret History,” “The Little Friend.”)

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

Publications

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)
• 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.