Geronimo Rex was published by Viking Press in 1972 and won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel. Harriman Monroe, a young man growing up in Dream of Pines, Louisiana, and later attending Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, careens through adolescence with a violence and hilarity that made the novel feel less written than detonated. Harriman idolizes the Apache chief Geronimo — not the historical figure but the spirit of ferocious resistance — and his own life becomes a series of reckless confrontations with authority, convention, and his own considerable capacity for self-destruction.
Hannah’s prose was unlike anything else in American fiction: fast, jagged, packed with compressed imagery, simultaneously Southern and modernist, capable of shifting from tenderness to brutality within a single sentence. He wrote as if every sentence might be the last one anyone would ever read.
Collecting Geronimo Rex
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1972): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Very good: $75–$200
- Signed first edition: $400–$1,000
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Hannah’s debut, William Faulkner Prize winner.
The Southern Debut
Hannah’s first novel (1972) follows Harry Monroe through adolescence in a small Louisiana town, through college, and into the chaos of the late 1960s. The novel won the William Faulkner Prize for best first novel and announced a major new voice in Southern fiction — one that combined Faulkner’s sense of place with a manic comic energy and a willingness to push language to its breaking point.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Hannah relate to the Southern literary tradition? Hannah is a direct descendant of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor — he shares their Gothic sensibility, their ear for Southern speech, and their conviction that the South’s history of violence and defeat has produced a uniquely rich literary culture. But Hannah’s prose is faster, more compressed, and more influenced by rock music and popular culture than his predecessors.