{"id":378621,"date":"2010-03-02T02:26:38","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T07:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chicagopressrelease.com\/press-releases\/author-barry-hannah-dies-at-67-in-mississippi"},"modified":"2010-03-02T02:26:38","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T07:26:38","slug":"author-barry-hannah-dies-at-67-in-mississippi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/378621","title":{"rendered":"Author Barry Hannah dies at 67 in Mississippi"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><p>JACKSON, Miss.  &#8212; Author Barry Hannah, whose fiction was laced with dark humor and populated by hard-drinking Southerners, died Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67.<\/p>\n<p>Lafayette County Coroner Rocky Kennedy said Hannah died Monday afternoon of &#8220;natural causes,&#8221; declining to elaborate until he shared the details with Hannah&#8217;s wife, Susan. <span id=\"more-21688\"><\/span>Kennedy said the death is not under investigation.<\/p>\n<p>Hannah&#8217;s first novel, &#8220;Geronimo Rex,&#8221; was published in 1972. It received the William Faulkner prize for writing and was nominated for a National Book Award. His 1996 short story collection, &#8220;High Lonesome,&#8221; was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n<p>Novelist and Mississippi native Richard Ford called Hannah &#8220;a shooting star.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling,&#8221; Ford said from his home in Maine. &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Longtime friend Malcolm White, the director of the Mississippi Arts Commission, said Hannah &#8220;loved words, fishing, his family and going fast.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Barry was Mississippi&#8217;s irreverent poet of the dark side, our rebellious, misfit uncle of the nightlife, the voice of the unrehearsed and the unapologetic outburst in corner of the room,&#8221; White said Monday.<\/p>\n<p>Hannah was born and raised in Mississippi. He graduated in 1964 from Mississippi College in Clinton and later earned a master&#8217;s degree in creative writing from the University of Arkansas.<\/p>\n<p>He taught writing at the University of Mississippi for more than 25 years. In 1996, Hannah told the student newspaper at the University of Mississippi that teaching inspired him.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The short fiction form that I teach is a great format for fine classroom conversation about the art,&#8221; Hannah said. &#8220;My writing has always been enhanced by my teaching.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He also worked as writer in residence at the University of Iowa, the University of Montana-Missoula and Middlebury College in Vermont.<\/p>\n<p>In 2003, Hannah was given the PEN\/Malamud Award, which recognizes excellence in the art of short fiction.<\/p>\n<p>Ford said he and Hannah spoke often about the idea of &#8220;Southernness.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We circled the whole issue of Southernness differently,&#8221; said Ford, whose novel, &#8220;Independence Day,&#8221; won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. &#8220;I think he embraced it in a way that he took sustenance from. He chose to live in William Faulkner&#8217;s town, chose to stay in the South, to his great strength and credit. But he was not a regional talent. He was much larger than that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The friendship between the two writers grew after Ford&#8217;s mother died in 1981. He said he drove from New Orleans to Oxford and just looked Hannah up.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I hadn&#8217;t ever really met him,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I&#8217;d heard about him, but didn&#8217;t really know him. He&#8217;s the one guy, I knew, who I could make a connection with. He took me in, saw to me. Even when he didn&#8217;t have to because I was just another writer he knew. I&#8217;ve always loved him for that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on <a  href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyherald.com\/story\/?id=362863&amp;src=143\" title=\"Author Barry Hannah dies at 67 in Mississippi\" rel='nofollow'>DailyHerald.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Distributed via <a href=\"http:\/\/chicagopressrelease.com\" rel='nofollow'>Chicago Press Release Services<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/lHg-VqYcHkGuMUUf69ChYQ7K7OU\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/lHg-VqYcHkGuMUUf69ChYQ7K7OU\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/lHg-VqYcHkGuMUUf69ChYQ7K7OU\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/lHg-VqYcHkGuMUUf69ChYQ7K7OU\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.chicagopressrelease.com\/~ff\/windycitynews?a=F_pPmAobUVw:FdqEG6Mp3bA:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/windycitynews?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.chicagopressrelease.com\/~ff\/windycitynews?a=F_pPmAobUVw:FdqEG6Mp3bA:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/windycitynews?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.chicagopressrelease.com\/~ff\/windycitynews?a=F_pPmAobUVw:FdqEG6Mp3bA:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/windycitynews?i=F_pPmAobUVw:FdqEG6Mp3bA:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/windycitynews\/~4\/F_pPmAobUVw\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>JACKSON, Miss. &#8212; Author Barry Hannah, whose fiction was laced with dark humor and populated by hard-drinking Southerners, died Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67. Lafayette County Coroner Rocky Kennedy said Hannah died Monday afternoon of &#8220;natural causes,&#8221; declining to elaborate until he shared the details with Hannah&#8217;s wife, Susan. Kennedy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}