Barry Hannah
Encyclopedia : B : BA : BAR : Barry Hannah
Barry Hannah, author of novels and short stories, was born in 1942 in Clinton, Mississippi. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Mississippi College in 1964. He spent the next three years at the University of Arkansas where he earned a Master of Arts in 1966 and the Master of Fine Arts in 1967.
Hannah's first novel, the grotesque coming-of-age tale Geromino Rex (1972), won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. Nightwatchmen (1973), Hannah's second novel was a flop, and is the only of his works which has not been reissued in paperback. Hannah returned to form, however, with the short-story collection Airships (1978), which today is considered a classic in its field. 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 genre for the rest of the decade, first with Bats Out of Hell (1993) and then with High Lonesome (1996), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. After a near-fatal bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Hannah returned in 2001 with Yonder Stands Your Orphan, his longest novel since Geronimo Rex. The title is taken from Bob Dylan's song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."
Apparently, Hannah is currently working on his next novel. In a 2003 interview with The Austin Chronicle, Hannah declared the novel to be called Last Days. However, a 2005 interview with Hannah in The Paris Review features a manuscript page from Hannah's forthcoming novel, now titled Long, Last, Happy. No date has been set for the publication of that novel.
Hannah has taught creative writing at Clemson University, Middlebury College, the University of Alabama, the University of Memphis,and he currently resides in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is the director of the MFA program in creative writing for prose fiction at the University of Mississippi.
Works
| ||
- Geronimo Rex (1972) - novel
- Nightwatchmen (1973) - novel
- Airships (1978) - short stories
- Ray (1980) - novel
- The Tennis Handsome (1983) - novel
- Captain Maximus (1985) - short stories
- Hey Jack! (1987) - novel
- Boomerang (1989) - novel
- Never Die (1991) - novel
- Bats out of Hell (1993) - short stories
- High Lonesome (1996) - short stories
- Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001) - novel
Awards
- The William Faulkner Prize
- The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction
- The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award
- The Award for Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters.
External links
- [Barry Hannah at the Mississippi Writers Page]
- [The Barry Hannah Society]
- [Audio Interview with Barry Hannah - RealAudio]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.