Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah Narrated by Duncan Hannah

Overview

A rollicking account of a celebrated artist's coming of age, full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more.

“A phantasmagoria of alcohol, sex, art, conversation, glam rock, and New Wave cinema. Hannah's writing combines self-aware humor with an intoxicating punk energy.” -The New Yorker

Painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

12/18/2017
Midway through this exuberant chronicle of his life in New York City in the 1970s, the author, who is now a distinguished painter, notes, “I’m living faster than I can write.” Composed from journals that Hannah kept between 1970 and 1981, the book reads like a modern Rake’s Progress, beginning with Hannah’s years at Bard College and following his move to Manhattan in 1973. Hannah writes candidly about his drug- and drink-fueled adventures, and he captures the kaleidoscopic swirl of the avant-garde art scene into which he immediately immersed himself. He hung out with Patti Smith, glam rockers, punk musicians, and members of Warhol’s Factory, and he writes about it all with a youthful wistfulness, observing, “I get the feeling from this society that New York takes care of its own, that all these eccentric characters have found a niche no other city would have provided for them.” He punctuates each journal with lists of books to read, movies to see, and music to hear that are as much a time capsule of the era as the celebrities, clubs, and concerts whose names he drops throughout. This is a more of a chronicle of N.Y.C.’s art scene in an exciting period than an introspective coming-of-age story. Still, it’s entertaining; readers will likely agree with Hannah’s assessment that “I was in the right place, at the right time, at the right age.” (Mar.)

From the Publisher

A phantasmagoria of alcohol, sex, art, conversation, glam rock, and New Wave cinema. Hannah’s writing combines self-aware humor with an intoxicating punk energy.” —The New Yorker

“A farewell to an entire era of decadence. . . . An unusually levelheaded portrait of New York in the seventies.” —The Paris Review

“Filled with gritty, evocative memories.” —Vice
 
“A gallery of the louche, the lurid, and the illuminating.” —Vanity Fair
 
“These diaries . . . are like the Dead Sea Scrolls of a mythological Lower Manhattan underground. As the writing progresses . . . we glean Duncan’s romance and eventual providence: to be cool is not the idea, being an artist in love with the universe is.” —Thurston Moore, co-founder of Sonic Youth

“In which a teenage Minnesota boy is drawn into the swirl of downtown New York in the 70s — yeah, lots of sex, drugs, rock n roll and art! Hannah’s personal documents become an accumulation of detailed cultural insights as he too becomes an accomplished artist. Complete with ‘guest appearances’ by just about everyone who defined the explosive scene of this period.” —Jim Jarmusch
 
“Twentieth-Century Boy provide[s] a rich, endlessly diverting answer to the question ‘What do men want?’ These journals—full of hunger, curiosity, and wonder—are raw, graceful time capsules. Art, sex, ambition, drugs, music, alcohol, movies, excesses, and extremes are all there, but Hannah observes the world around him with rare, and loving, attention.” —Joan Juliet Buck

“Hannah documents that impetuous, drugged-up scene with flushed revelry and latent apprehension. These journals, simultaneously breathtaking and detached, are riveting cautionary tales, demonstrating the necessity of raw experimentation as a source of discovery and creativity.” —Bookforum

“Eloquent and funny, written by a teen wise beyond his years. Duncan Hannah’s journals bring back the adolescence that most of us wish we had.” —Gillian McCain, coauthor of Please Kill Me

“Hannah’s book illuminates this last great bohemia. . . . How fortunate that [he] managed to stagger home to bed to . . . immortalise his passage through this starry vortex.” —The Art Newspaper

“So brilliant, so sexy, so real.” —Danny Fields

“Terrific! Delightfully funny, written with great candor.” —Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of Let It Be

“[A] hugely entertaining diary.” —John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“A portrait of someone in love with and endlessly intrigued by the world around him. . . . Hannah has survived the seventies. More than that, he has kept them alive, in ink.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Hannah’s . . . good looks, talent, determination, and . . . his absolute willingness to test the human body’s capacities for alcohol, drugs, and (especially) sex . . . make us exceedingly fortunate that he wrote everything down. The other great joy . . . , apart from the splendor of all that excess, is the straight-line, crisp, beautiful nonchalance of his style.” —Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story

“A dandy, a flaneur, a rock ’n’ roll wastrel wandering Candide-like through the dangerous undercurrents of the 1970s: if Duncan Hannah didn’t exist, you’d have to invent him.” —Jon Savage, author of England’s Dreaming and 1966

“A breezy, demotically precise portrait of Bowie-and-Warhol New York.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“An American literary classic. . . . Twentieth-Century Boy reads like a carefully crafted work of art. Savvy readers might be inclined to see it as literary kin to James Joyce’s classic, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. . . . [It] offers a fast-paced record of a time and a place unlike [any] other.” —New York Journal of Books

“That these pages were written by a raw boy painter and not an éminence grise master of the art of memoir is key to their magic and mystery. A Pillow Book from a decade when no one ever slept.” —Brad Gooch

Kirkus Reviews

2017-11-20
An intensely personal and engrossing portrait of a bygone era.As Hannah states in the preface, his first book is "not a memoir," but rather "journals, begun in 1970, at the age of seventeen, written as it happened, filled with youthful indiscretions." As such, it benefits from an immediacy and exuberance that the hindsight, self-censorship, editing, and foggy recollections of a proper memoir would most certainly lack. The book begins rather unceremoniously with the author in high school in suburban Minneapolis; he was a budding artist and musician, precocious reader, and typical rebellious American teenager in search of drugs, sex, and kicks. He longed for big city nights far from his staid surroundings, and after a short tenure at Bard College, he landed in Greenwich Village in 1973 to attend Parsons School of Design. An avid partier and drinker in the right place at the right time, the author met and/or befriended a variety of the celebrities of the day, many of whom would go on to become legends (Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, David Bowie). Hannah's frequently poetic descriptions of his underground cohorts recalls Genet's parade of subversive heroes, and the author's enthusiasm for la vie bohème and general disdain for the square world at times reads like a cross between a glam-rock Kerouac and a stoned Holden Caulfield (in the best possible way). Along the way, readers receive all the lurid details of the author's sex life—by turns romantic, erotic, dramatic, and hilarious—as well as a portrait of a young artist truly coming of age. Eventually, Hannah spent less time hanging out with rock stars and more time in his studio, culminating in his showing several works in the Times Square Show in 1980 alongside luminaries like Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer.Devotees of the underground art and punk scenes of 1970s New York will devour Hannah's journals, each page of which contains something fascinating or worthy of note—best enjoyed while listening to Bowie's "Diamond Dogs," Television's "Marquee Moon," and Patti Smith's "Horses."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171819613
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/13/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Mystic Eyes
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Twentieth-Century Boy"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Duncan Hannah.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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