Barry Hannah - Life and Work

Life and Work

Early Life

Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi.

Education

At Mississippi College, Hannah majored in pre-med but later switched to literature. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mississippi College in Clinton 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.

Publications

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.

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. The stories will 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 published during his lifetime and the final manuscript he left behind."

Teaching

Hannah taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Clemson University, Middlebury College, the University of Alabama, Texas State University, the University of Memphis and the University of Montana - Missoula. Hannah was a frequent visiting writer at the summer creative writing seminars at Sewanee and Bennington.

Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program and was regarded as a generous mentor. 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.”)

Death

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.