March 2, 2010
Talk of the South
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Maude Schuyler Clay
Goings On
Barry Hannah: 1942-2010
This coming weekend, the great novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah was to be honored at the Oxford Conference for the Book* in Oxford, Mississippi. Tragically, he suffered a heart attack and died yesterday at the age of sixty-seven. He will be greatly missed by fans of Southern literature, by the scores of writers who were inspired by him, and by his friends and admirers at Garden & Gun.
Hannah was born and raised in Mississippi, and for the last two decades he taught creative writing at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. But the power of his fiction extended far beyond the South. As Mississippi native and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford told the New York Times yesterday, “Barry could somehow make the English sentence more generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling.”
If you’re not familiar with Hannah’s work, read “Barry Hannah’s Long Shadow,” by Wells Tower, which ran in G&G in November 2008. Or better yet, read Hannah’s famous short story “Water Liars,” which appeared in his groundbreaking collection, Airships, in 1978. Or read Geronimo Rex, Bats Out of Hell, High Lonesome, or anything by Hannah you can get your hands on. His view of the world was dark, but his sentences were like bolts of lightning. No doubt he will be thrilling readers for a long time to come. He sure as hell thrilled us.
*As of this writing the Oxford Conference for the Book is scheduled to continue as planned.
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- READ "Barry Hannah's Long Shadow"
- READ "Water Liars"
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