Richard Hell
Richard Hell first came to public attention in the mid 1970s as an originator of punk. His music albums include Blank Generation and Destiny Street. In 1984 he retired from music and resumed his original ambition, which was to write books. He is the author of numerous such works of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, and autobiography, including The Voidoid, Across the Years, Artifact, Go Now, Hot and Cold, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Massive Pissed Love, and What Just Happened. He’s also co-author of several collaborative books, including, with songwriter and musician Tom Verlaine, the collection of poems Wanna Go Out? (published under the heteronym Theresa Stern), and with the artist Christopher Wool the book of image-texts Psychopts.
When Bob Dylan invokes Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s relationship in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” it’s as the ultimate intensifier of a relationship gone bad. Paul Vaughn, assuming the role of Verlaine in Richard Hell’s novel Godlike, acts as the steward to sixteen-year old poetic “seer” T., this novel’s Rimbaud, as he spelunks the underground poetry scene of New York in the 1970s.
