He has also been writer in residence at Middlebury College. He has received a Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction (1970), a Bread Loaf Fellowship (1971), and the first Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award for
Airships (1978).
Hannah began Geronimo Rex (1972) while he was a creative-writing student at the University of Arkansas. It is an initiation novel which tells the story of Harry Monroe, the novel's protagonist and narrator, as he grows up in Dream of Pines, Louisiana, a squalid paper-mill town. The novel begins with eight-year-old Harry listening to the Dream of Pines Colored High School band, a miracle of sound and marching drama. One of its members, Harley Butte, a French-horn player who loves military music and thinks of himself as the spiritual son of John Philip Sousa, is a foil for Harry in some ways--in race, in occupation, in age--but in important sections of the novel, the fates of these two become interlocked. They become friends despite the segregated social structure of the South.
Harry's life as a high school and college student constitutes a comic quest, a search for certitude, symbolized by his longings for the bright world outside the oppressive boundaries of the provinces.
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