APBarry Hannah directed the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford.
Award-winning author Barry Hannah died of a heart attack in his home on March 1, leaving behind an impressive body of work that includes nine novels and four collections of short stories.
Hannah's favorite setting was the American South. Born in Mississippi, the author imbued his novels with a fresh, Southern flare. His talent was compared with such giants of Southern literature as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.
Hannah broke onto the literary scene in 1972 with his debut novel, Geronimo Rex, a coming of age story that won the William Faulkner prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. He followed that with the short story collection Airstrips, another award-winning literary work which explored the Vietnam and Civil Wars and the modern South. His final work, a collection of stories called Sick Soldiers at Your Door, is set to be published later this year.
Hannah's style was described as intensely personal, frenetic and comedic. In remembrance, we listen back on an interview with the novelist and short story writer who Truman Capote once called "the maddest writer in the U.S.A."
This interview was originally broadcast on July 31, 2001.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124275611
March 4, 2010 
Barry Hannah directed the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford.
Award-winning author Barry Hannah died of a heart attack in his home on March 1, leaving behind an impressive body of work that includes nine novels and four collections of short stories.
Hannah's favorite setting was the American South. Born in Mississippi, the author imbued his novels with a fresh, Southern flare. His talent was compared with such giants of Southern literature as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.
Hannah broke onto the literary scene in 1972 with his debut novel, Geronimo Rex, a coming of age story that won the William Faulkner prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. He followed that with the short story collection Airstrips, another award-winning literary work which explored the Vietnam and Civil Wars and the modern South. His final work, a collection of stories called Sick Soldiers at Your Door, is set to be published later this year.
Hannah's style was described as intensely personal, frenetic and comedic. In remembrance, we listen back on an interview with the novelist and short story writer who Truman Capote once called "the maddest writer in the U.S.A."
This interview was originally broadcast on July 31, 2001.
Heard on Fresh Air from WHYY
March 4, 2010 - TERRY GROSS, host:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=124275611
The novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah died of a heart attack Monday. He was 67. We're going to listen back to excerpt of the interview I recorded with him.
Larry McMurtry called Hannah the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O'Conner. William Styron described Hannah as an original, one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation.
Hannah wrote about the American South. He grew up in Mississippi and taught for many years at the University Mississippi. He won the William Faulkner prize and was a National Book Award finalist.
When I spoke with him in July 2001, his book "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" had just been published. The title borrowed a line from the Dylan song, "It's All Over Now Baby Blue." There are orphans and guns in the novel and plenty of evil as a killer changes the lives of everyone around him. Hannah wrote the book while getting chemotherapy treatments for lymphoma.
Here's Hannah introducing a short reading from the book.
Mr. BARRY HANNAH (Author): This is Man Mortimer, who is the evil that lurks in this book and he likes to cut people. He comes from Missouri, and this little piece about him.
At this juncture he had no plans to hurt people around the lake. He did not like bodies of water much, had never seen the ocean. He was indifferent to trees. Soil was hateful to him, as was the odor of fish. But like many another man, forty-five years in age, he wanted his youth back.
He wanted to have pals, sports, high school girls. This need had rushed on him lately. He lived in three houses, but he had no home. He did not like the hearth, smells from the kitchen, an old friend for a wife, small talk. It all seemed a vicious closet to him. He moved, he took, he was admired. But he had developed a taste for young and younger flesh. This was thrilling and meant high money. Men and women in this nation were changing, and he intended to charge them for it.
Religion had neither formed nor harmed him. Neither had his parents in southern Missouri. But he despised the weakness of the church, and of his parents, whom he had gulled. He was a pretty boy born of hawk-nosed people. It was a curse to have these looks and no talent. Long and lank. Hooded eyes, sensual lips that sang no tune. Still, he quit the football team because of what it did to his hair, claiming a back ailment that had exempted him from manual labor since age 14. There are thousands of men of this condition, most of them sorry and shiftless, defeated at the start. Many are compulsive and snarling fools, emeritus at 20.
GROSS: Is this character of Man Mortimer based on anyone?
Mr. HANNAH: No he's not. He's a compound and I've gotten just by looking around and believing that I perceived evil in front of me. So it is imaginative but a collected history of my impressions, I believe.
GROSS: You describe him as a quiet man, a gambler, a liaison for stolen cars and a runner of whores, including three Vicksburg housewives. Describe his kind of crime.
Mr. HANNAH: His kind of crime is the kind of crime that begins out of laziness and being admired by women. He finds he can make a living at it, and he continues since he ran away from home in high school. He's not been particularly violent but he has induced violence and suicides in others. He is a thief. He has a stolen car ring, especially expensive SUV's. He's a man who doesnt like to work and he doesnt like much of what's offered by nature. So I've seen him as an alien without real pals and only a commercial connection to women.
He wants to join in society now but he only knows how to hurt, and that's the basis of the book - evil when it reaches out to you and when it befriends you. And in Mortimer's case, he likes to use a knife. He's dangerous and he has made quite a deal of money off the casino life around Vicksburg.
GROSS: Has evil like Man Mortimer's kind of evil ever come into your life?
Mr. HANNAH: I've been around it. Usually evil is something you can't face. It simply has to wear out. Sometimes you work for evil unwittingly. And I can't think of a particular person right now, but I think I've felt the closeness of evil in casinos and it brings out the old Baptist in me. I find the wretched excess and the sort of zombified folks that attend and participate in casinos pathetic and also dangerous in many cases.
GROSS: Now what about violence? There's some violence in this book. Has violence come into your life? Have you witnessed it? Have you ever had a violent streak yourself?
Mr. HANNAH: I liked to throw knives back in my drinking days. But no, I've never been personally violent. I can't be an honest man though, and tell you -but that I am occupied by violence. It seems to be out of my nightmares. And my wife wishes I wouldnt write about violence, but as soon as the pen starts going I become interested in it all over again and as if it's almost dictated to me. I've been writing for 35 years and it's attended a good deal of my work. At this point, I dont think I can do anything but confess that I am a student - and of violence, because of what it does - because of how it quickens the character of those around it.
GROSS: Youve also collected guns, right?
Mr. HANNAH: I've collected guns. Yes.
GROSS: And have you used them? What kind of things do you use them for?
Mr. HANNAH: I have not used a gun in 10 years.
GROSS: Mm-hmm.
Mr. HANNAH: If I used them right now I'd shoot beer cans at the city dump. It's a 22 rifle. Now, I dont have any real personal urge to shoot anymore. It just past, and I've never shot at a human being, never threatened a human being, if that's covering the subject.
GROSS: So what did you use the guns for?
Mr. HANNAH: You know, this is a difficult thing to explain to others about how a gun is a piece of art. Guns are history. I like to look at the mechanism. I like to feel the heft. And they are a kind of history. So that's about all I can say. I dont collect guns anymore but I'm not sorry for the ones I have. They just feel like a decent hunk of the past hanging on the wall.
GROSS: Describe where you grew up.
Mr. HANNAH: I grew up in Clinton, Mississippi, which is right outside the state capital in Jackson. But it was a distinct village; about 2,000 people with a little college - a little Baptist college. So that we had professors and for neighbors. And the culture of the Baptist church, the high school band, and the football team. That was it. That was civilization as I knew it. Also there was no crime. We disappeared sometimes in the summer at eight o'clock in the morning, didnt come back until seven at night. There was no fear because we -the whole village took care of us.
GROSS: Did you go to the Baptist church?
Mr. HANNAH: Oh yes, I did. Yeah.
GROSS: What was the oratory like in the church and do you think that that influenced your sense of storytelling or the way you write?
Mr. HANNAH: The preachers did not, but the Bible itself has. I just, the rhythms of the Old and New Testament, the King James version, are just as solidly set in a person of my era who went to church as a moral foundation. I make sentences, I'm sure, from Biblical rhythms. I've been called post-Modernist but I doubt it. I think I just write in more fragmented ways and narration. But the base of my sentences, although they are sometimes Baroque, is I think from the Scriptures as far as I can feel it myself.
We read a lot of the Bible. We knew Scriptures by heart, especially Psalms and a great bit of the Book of John, the Sermon on the Mount, and - from Matthew and certain things like that were memorized. And I had them memorized until I was 15-16 years old.
GROSS: Can you think of a line or a passage from the Bible that has the kind of rhythms that youre speaking of, and how they influenced you?
Mr. HANNAH: Yeah, it's something like the 23 Psalm. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow and so on. But this had just a such wonderful basic human poetry in it. And I never was sophisticated enough to consider the Bible as literature until I was - I never even heard the term the Bible as literature until I was way into graduate school. So I - in fact, I'd stopped going to church. But the church is - the Scriptures are very much with me and more and more now I'm reading Mark and John in the Bible. Not all the time but I just love the clarity and the mystery at the same time.
GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.
Mr. HANNAH: You bet.
GROSS: Barry Hannah recorded in July 2001. He died Monday of a heart attack at the age of 67. His work is the focus of this year's Annual Oxford Conference of the Book, which began today. The conference is dedicated to him.
Coming up, David Edelstein reviews Tim Burton's new film "Alice in Wonderland."
This is FRESH AIR.
Comment: (only thing that's made me laugh all night)
Bobby Peru (bobby_peru) wrote:
The book of stories is called Airships, not Airstrips. Its phenomenal, by the way.
Friday, March 05, 20
R.I.P. Barry Hannah Author Reads also Jim Dickinson [HQ]
by Mo Rourk (videos)
15:00
R.I.P. Barry Hannah - This Video is about a person who has recently died. Some information, such as that pertaining to the circumstances of the person's death and surrounding events may change as more facts become known.--Mo'RIPedia
R.I.P. Barry Hannah Author Reads also Jim Dickinson
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=104639982898687
R.I.P. Barry Hannah - author of "Geronimo Rex, " "High Lonesome" and other titles, died March 2, 2010. Hannah also taught writing at the University of Mississippi for 25 years. He was 67.
Howard Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.
***Whomever wishes to be tagged on this video either for yourself or to send to a friend, just let me know. Thanks
"Can you hear the pipes groan in this letter?
Tell me something happy.
Did you ever look down the arms of Hannah, Barry?"
MO'R
"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 R.I.P. Reads Oxford MS
Uploaded by mrjyn. - Up-to-the minute news videos.
http://twitter.com/nichopoulouzo/status/10067244358
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Hannah
- - -
Barry Hannah Search Results from my Emails:
Résultats de la recherche de mes emails:
Dear David Ferrari and Scott Kronecker: I met two of you at different times and enjoy talking w you about Barry Hannah, PG Tips, and potential job openings in your store first arriving in Fremont.
Between Melissa and me:
I do fuck-all about my day Irish Memorial.
Can you hear the pipes groan in this letter?
Tell me something happy.
Did you ever look down their arms Hannah Barry?
Dead Mile Filter (I think - in Gaelic), Grok. IF you have quoted Ulysses few unknowns, but is too difficult to find my preferred point.
Dear Mel, You'll never guess where in wr ng this letter from?:. O house of alcohol.
I m raised and confused because both alcohol and because I've been on the set of "Unchain My Heart" - the story of Ray Charles, played by Jaime Fox, where I have a role that draws extrema not frolicking all day today and I found a fridge full of beer from the airport I started drinking when he throat became clear we were not going to get tonight.
So effectually they gave us a call time of 6>00 am tomorrow to do the same stuff mothering.
But I saw my ex ex girlfriend by chance, who now lives in Los Angeles and holds an MA in costume design and worked on the film - very soporific her to talk to me after what I put the poor thro0uhg child when she lived w me on Royal, I am a walker airport as a supplement and I look funky like a son of a b h like is supposed to be 1964 and the scene is wearying Ray is set in a toilet at the airport while the State Trio [people try to dodge.
These fodder like me.
You see I was right about the evanescence of Oxford.
Do not tell if your man met my husband, Barry Hannah?
Tomorrow I'll shine like Jack Kerouac in my halo Dexedrine I walk past the camera in the coolest place you've ever seen.
Yours, \ nicely.
***Whomever wishes to be tagged on this video either for yourself or to send to a friend, just let me know. Thanks
This article is about a person who has recently died. Some information, such as that pertaining to the circumstances of the person's death and surrounding events, may change as more facts become known.
Barry Hannah
Born April 23, 1942(1942-04-23)
Meridian, Mississippi, USA
Died March 1, 2010 (aged 67)
Oxford, Mississippi, USA
Occupation short story writer, novelist, professor
Period 1965 – 2010
Genres short story, novel
William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Gordon Lish, Cormac McCarthy
Influenced
Larry Brown, Bob Shacochis, Donna Tartt, Cynthia Shearer, Wells Tower, Jonathan Miles
Howard Barry Hannah (April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010) was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.
"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[3]
Hannah was the author of eight novels and five short story collections (some sites list it as nine novels and four short story collections).[4] He worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin. His work was published in Esquire, the New Yorker, The Oxford American , Southern Review, and a host of American magazines and quarterlies.
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.[4]
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 natural causes.
Early Life
Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi.
Education
At Mississippi College, Hannah was pre-med but 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 first publication was a story 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.
"Sometimes you don’t want to arrange your memory. I love the pure chaos of it and just the reverie of it for its own sake. I think that is what a writer has: a better memory than most people, or at least a more sensual memory. Language and memory are what it is all about".
Barry Hannah
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.
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.”)
Those that don’t avert their eyes are the real artists. It is concentration, that’s what Dostoevsky said. Concentration is what the artist is about: he can look, and look, and look, and look. He carries no brief. He will tell you everything he sees. This sensibility will overcome every tendency to capsulize or moralize or philosophize; it is why, despite the themes and philosophy announced in behalf of an author by others, the actual art experience is much more whole.
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.
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)
* Sick Soldier at Your Door (2010)
Essays
* "Memories of Tennessee Williams," Mississippi Review, Vol. 48, 1995.
* "Introduction" The Book of Mark, Pocket Canon, Grove-Atlantic, 1999.
Awards and Honors
* 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.
* The PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction
External Links/Webliography
Interviews
* Oxford American interview 2001
* Bomb interview, 2001
* An interview with Barry Hannah at Mississppi Review Online; interview conducted by James D. Lilley and Brian Oberkirch, October 23, 1996 on the balcony of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
* Wired For Books Audio Interview with Barry Hannah
* Mississippi Review Vol. 25, No. 3, Barry Hannah Special (Spring, 1997)
* Paris Review interview with Barry Hannah, 2004
* R. Vanarsdall, "The Spirits Will Win Through: An Interview with Barry Hannah," Southern Review 19:22, 317-341, 1983.
Reviews and perspectives
* 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.
* Perspectives on Barry Hannah Edited by Martyn Bone
Exhibits, sites, and homepages
* Barry Hannah at the Mississippi Writers Page
* "Southern Destroyer" in Austin Chronicle
Selected online publications
* Water Liars the full text of a short story from Hannah's 1978 collection Airships
* "Testimony of Pilot" by Barry Hannah
* Barry Hannah on Tennessee Williams, Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 48, 1995.
* "Evening of the Yarp: A Report From Roonswent Dover," by Barry Hannah Mississippi Review Vol. 25, No. 3, Barry Hannah Special (Spring, 1997), pp. 89-105.
Obituaries
* GuardianUK obituary, March 2, 2010
* Hannah, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 67 obituary by William Grimes in The New York Times
* Barry Hannah 1942 — 2010 This "cyber-tombeau" at Silliman's Blog by poet Ron Silliman includes comments, tributes, and links
* Barry Hannah, Author, Dies at 67 in Mississippi Filed by The Associated Press; Published: March 2, 2010
References
1. ^ a b c Mississippi Review Online: An interview with Barry Hannah
2. ^ Obituary New York Times, March 3, 2010; page A27.
3. ^ a b c Author Barry Hannah dies at 67 in Mississippi by Emily Wagster Pettus (AP)
4. ^ a b c Oxford Conference for the Book
5. ^ Barry Hannah 1942-2010 from the website of Oxford American: The Southern Magazine of Good Writing
6. ^ Barry Hannah, R.I.P. tribute and obituary at the Wilmington (NC) Star News website
7. ^ "Barry Hannah: A Southern Literary Force Dies At 67". National Public Radio. March 4, 2010. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124275611. Retrieved March 4, 2010.
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