Barry Hannah, 1942-2010

Barry Hannah, 1942-2010, originally uploaded by edition_of_one.

An American original. We will miss you.

The Reading Life: Mississippi Without Barry Hannah

By DWIGHT GARNER

Word of Barry Hannah’s death hit a lot of people hard this week, nowhere more so than in Oxford, Miss., where Mr. Hannah lived, wrote and taught for nearly three decades. He was an institution there, a living embodiment of that city’s reputation as a cerebral but rowdy literary nerve center.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to describe Mr. Hannah’s death – when added to the 2004 demise of the novelist Larry Brown, another defining Oxford writer – as something akin to an emotional and literary Katrina for Oxford. It’s a flattening blow. A decade or so ago the town was packed with writers (Mr. Hannah, Mr. Brown, John Grisham) and powerful magazines like the Oxford American. Now Mr. Hannah and Mr. Brown have passed away, and Mr. Grisham has gone off to Virginia. The Oxford American? It’s relocated to Arkansas. The next generation of fully formed Mississippi writers – of Oxford writers – hasn’t quite swung into view.

“Literature is one of the few things Mississippi can really be proud of,” Richard Howorth, the owner with his wife, Lisa, of Square Books, Oxford’s venerable bookstore, told me in 1997. (Mr. Howorth has also been Oxford’s mayor.) To walk into his bookstore is to get a crash course in that state’s literary past. You’ll see prominently displayed books not just by William Faulkner, Oxford’s most famous hometown boy, but by many others the state claims as its own: Eudora Welty, Richard Ford, Shelby Foote, Willie Morris, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams and Donna Tartt, not to mention Mr. Hannah and Mr. Brown.

But Mr. Ford and Ms. Tartt no longer live in the state, a place that once birthed and nurtured its writers but now seems to export them, like doctors from India.

The fear, of course, is that after losing its core writers Oxford will become just another groovy college town, one that happens to have a killer bookstore. That’s unlikely. But with Mr. Hannah’s passing, this unique and valuable patch of American turf is bound to be suffering from a mild identity crisis.