- 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 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,":
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 [Hannah] 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.