SOURCE: Bone, Martyn. “The ‘Southern’ Conundrum, Continued: Barry Hannah and Richard Ford.” Mississippi Quarterly 53, no. 3 (summer 2000): 459-66.

In the following essay, Bone compares Ford's writing with that of Barry Hannah, in terms of both authors' designation as Southern writers. Bone argues that Ford's Independence Day is not focused solely on the South, but is a comment on America as a whole in the late twentieth century.

Barry Hannah was born in Clinton in 1942; Richard Ford was born in Jackson in 1944. Given their Mississippian background and—for all that Allen Tate first declared the “Southern Renascence” dead when little Barry and Richard were still in diapers—the ongoing obsession with the fortunes and “future of Southern letters,” it is hardly surprising that many critics have focused upon the “Southernness” of Hannah's and Ford's fiction. Ford began his career with a novel which he hoped “nobody would ever recognize as...