Geronimo Rex Signed First Edition Reference

Geronimo Rex is Barry Hannah’s debut novel, published by Viking in 1972 and awarded the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel. It follows Harriman Monroe through adolescence and young adulthood in Mississippi — a coming-of-age story told in Hannah’s characteristically electric prose, where every sentence crackles with energy and the narrative careens between realism, fantasy, and pure verbal exuberance.

The Novel

The book announces Hannah’s distinctive voice from its opening pages. Harriman Monroe is a young man of fierce appetites and limited prospects who navigates the violence, racism, humor, and sexual confusion of growing up in the mid-century South. The novel’s structure is episodic — a series of set pieces connected by Harriman’s restless, overheated consciousness — and the effect is less like reading a conventional novel than like being caught in a tornado of language.

The Faulkner Foundation Award recognized what attentive readers immediately saw: a new voice in Southern fiction, one that acknowledged Faulkner’s legacy while refusing to be intimidated by it. Hannah’s Mississippi is not Faulkner’s — it is louder, funnier, more violent, and more anarchic, a South seen through the lens of rock and roll rather than Greek tragedy.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Viking Press, New York Publication date: 1972 Copyright page: First edition per Viking convention

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
• Inscribed copies: $400–$1,200
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $75–$200

As Hannah’s debut and Faulkner Award winner, Geronimo Rex commands the highest prices in his bibliography after Airships. The first printing was modest, and fine copies with intact dust jackets are genuinely scarce.