Barry
Hannah
The Mississippi Writers and Musicians Project of Starkville High School
Photo by Karen Newsom
Barry
Hannah
Major
WorksBarry Hannah, author of numerous Southern novels and short stories, was born in Clinton, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942 (U. Miss.). In 1964, he obtained a B.A. from Mississippi College, and later earned an M.A. and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas in 1966 and 1967 (Barnes & Noble). Then, Hannah taught creative writing at Clemson University in South Carolina until 1973, earning several writing awards in the meantime (U. Miss.). Barry Hannah's writing style has been influenced by great Southern writers such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote (Limsky), and Eudora Welty (Contemporary Criticism, 231). Geronimo Rex, Hannah's first novel, earned him the William Faulkner Prize for writing and a nomination for the National Book Award (Kornegay). The novel Nightwatchmen, published one year later, confirmed his reputation as an up-and-coming writer (U. Miss.).
After teaching at Clemson, Hannah taught for
a short period at Middlebury College in Vermont and then for five years
at the University of Alabama (Barnes & Noble). While at Alabama,
Hannah wrote Airships (1978), which won the Arnold Gingrich
Short Fiction Award and the Award for Literature from the American Institute
of Arts and Letters (U. Miss.).
After
teaching at Alabama, Hannah moved to Hollywood to write screenplays for
director Robert Altman. Ray was published while he
was there, but he decided to leave Hollywood behind. He then took
several one-year teaching and writer-in-residence positions at universities
around the country. For the past sixteen years he has lived
in Oxford, Mississippi, teaching creative writing from the position of
writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi (U. Miss.).
While there, he has published The Tennis Handsome (1983),
Captain Maximus (1985), Hey Jack! (1987), and
Boomerang(1989). More recently, Hannah has published Never
Die (1991), Bats Out of Hell (1993),
and High Lonesome (1996), which was nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize in fiction (Annotations).
The critical reaction to Hannah's work has
focused on his dark style of writing. His characters in High
Lonesome have been described as "tormented characters" (Kornegay).
Hannah's style is described in Drew Limsky's article as "...drawn to the
festering rural misfit--the 40-year old at the end of the bar who's scratching
his beard stubble and wondering why he didn't amount to much." Hannah
himself has said that he prefers writing short stories to novels, and states
that "Teaching inspires me... My writing has been described as 'hypnotic'
and 'almost relentlessly interior'" (U. Miss. NewsDesk).
In the past twenty-five years, Barry Hannah
has published eight novels, three short story collections, two works of
nonfiction, and one work for the Hollywood screen (U. Miss.). He
has received numerous awards and recognition for his work and is generally
regarded as a master of modern fiction. Recently, the Fellowship
of Southern Writers awarded him the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.
Moreover, Barry Hannah is currently writing another novel (Hannah [letter]).
This just shows that this Mississippi author is far from through astounding
the world with amazing writing.
The novel Bommerang by Barry
Hannah is a story filled with love, war, good times, and bad. This
novel is a firsthand look at Hannah's life with fictional names and scenes
occasionally inserted to make the novel more interesting for the reader.
This novel uses the symbol of a boomerang to represent the memory and the
influence of the past upon the present (Day 94). 
In
the novel Hannah leaps from one memory to another, sharing his feelings
filled with triumph and tragedy. For example, Hannah shares times
that include his failures in his previous marriages, his struggling relationship
with his children, and his friendship with other writers and actors.
Boomerang's settings were many. The novel started off with the author telling about youthful acts in a peach orchard and ended with the compelling story of his friend Yelvertson in Memphis. Hannah makes the reader actually feel like he is part of Hannah's life. The novel was written in first person with Hannah sharing his own thoughts with the reader. Hannnah's attempt to portray life as it really happened is sometimes dulled with some of his obvious fictional mind-set.
This novel has no set themes. Hannah just shows the good side of life and the bad in a style that is amusing to the reader. Hannah writes about many problems that he tries to overcome, but he also names many enjoyable experiences.
In conclusion, this novel was very humorous and enjoyable. Hannah's style is an excellent way for an author to write about his life and not make it boring for the reader. Hannah gets a lot of criticism for some of his work, but I think he is one of Mississippi's most distinguished authors with an interesting writing style that is fun to read.
In Barry Hannah's novel The Tennis Handsome, he stretches
the bounds of modern literature. In a literal way he does this through
the use of extensive verisimilitude in his writing, both in dialogue and
in action, describing the speech accurately and the liaisons of the characters
in detail. While this frankness may be found offensive by some, the
story, while speaking frequently of such actions, is not centered on the
encounters but on the relationships of the four central Vicksburg natives
in which the rendez-vous play a part.
His narrative moves quickly from character to character, changing viewpoints
as it goes, almost in a Faulknerian style. The narrative begins with
Dr. "Baby" Levaster and French Edward, moves to Dr. James Word, and finds
Captain Bobby Smith fighting in Vietnam. From the time each character
is introduced, Hannah follows their lives, showing how they change, or
don't change, and how the lives of the four central characters, all from
Vicksburg, converge--flashbacks to before the opening of the story reveal
that when the tennis handsome French Edward was in high school, none of
the other characters know him, but by the end of the story they all know
each other quite well. As the story progresses, the same sequences
of events are sometimes viewed by different people, giving a vivid reality
to the story. Furthermore, as the foursome's lives begin intertwining,
they draw in all who know them into their dance and add the newcomers to
each other's lives.
The story is skillfully written in a style of grim reality where life is no more than it appears to be, and often less, where the frailties of human nature and the follies of life are shown to be overbearing, and where is fathomed the dark realities of the four lives.
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