Twentieth-Century Boy

Notebooks of the Seventies

By: Duncan Hannah

Narrated by: Duncan Hannah

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.

Intamate portrait of a NYC

A very intimate portrait of the time. Capturing the intense creativity and at the same time the drug filled debauchery. Thoughtful and intelligent!

great! did he make amends?

You can’t help liking Duncan as an artist, author, reader. He’s funny and has geeat taste in music, clothes, films, books (he lists them all.) But his story is full of young women he treated like sh*t. I know he later found sobriety (he was admittedly a serious alcoholic from his teens) but I wonder what became of his castoffs. I have never heard of a good-looking person retelling compliments and mad crushes attributed to his (very real!) beauty so matter-of-factly. Or confessing with minimal regret to so many lies and infidelities. Granted this is not a memoir but a series of journals. There’s no reflecting from an advanced age, just unrepentant contemporaneous accounts of his comings and goings. A fascinating time capsule.

Childish drivel in search of an editor

I am amazed this silly pointless nonsense was published. From the annoying sound effects delivered by the narrator/author to the hopeless memories of dry humping teen angst I groaned my way through as much of Mr. Hannah's tedium as I could stomach. So much of what is written here are observations and therefore are others stolen memories.

I was living in New York City at the same time Mr Hannah says he was. I experienced and saw much more interesting and exciting events. I can't name drop as much as this author as I have more respect for the privacy of people I associated with. But of course, without the names dropped there would be no book.

Don't waste your credits. Read books by those who had the courage to actually do something interesting.