Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll wrote The Basketball Diaries the story about growing up with drugs and sex and about learning to survive on the streets of New York--once again in print. An urban classic of coming of age.which in the 90s was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.



About Jim Carroll (from http://www.catholicboy.com)

Descended from three generations of Irish Catholic bartenders, Carroll was born in New York City in 1950. He spent his childhood living on the city's Lower East Side, attending Catholic schools, and at age 12, shortly before his family moved to Upper Manhattan, he began keeping the journal that would eventually be published as The Basketball Diaries (1978). In this diary he recorded the ins and outs of his remarkable adolescence. A star basketball player and excellent student, he won a scholarship to Trinity, an elite private school on Manhattan's posh upper West side.

While leading the Trinity Tigers to victory as an "All Ivy" player, Jim led a double life. He had first experimented with heroin at age 13, unfortunately thinking marijuana was the addictive stuff; he was soon a junkie, supporting his habit by hustling gay men.
By age 15, he was still hooked, but he was also writing poems and attending poetry workshops at St. Mark's Poetry Project. His diaries immediately attracted the attention of the literary crowd around him. When he published Organic Trains, his first collection of poetry, at age 16, and excerpts from
The Basketball Diaries were printed in Paris Review, he was firmly established as a genuine prodigy and a literary talent to be reckoned with.
Poet Ted Berrigan took young Jim under his wing, and toting a manuscript of The Basketball Diaries, the pair made a pilgrimage to see Jack Kerouac, who observed, "At thirteen years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89 percent of the novelists working today." Likewise, William S. Burroughs dubbed Carroll "a born writer."
As he reached the end of his teens, he moved within one of the most exciting arts scenes ever to develop in America. In the 1970s, the period he writes about in Forced Entries (1987), he hung out with Beat guru Allen Ginsberg and worked for artists Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol (he even appeared in two Warhol films), lived with Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, and was rubbing shoulders with people like William Burroughs, Bob Dylan, and the Velvet Underground.
He can, in fact, be heard between songs on the Velvet Underground's legendary Live at Max's Kansas City album--he was holding the microphone.
After publishing Living at the Movies in 1973, Jim fled New York and headed to California to finally kick his epic heroin addiction.
He spent several years enjoying solitude, writing poetry and . . . song lyrics. He had toyed with the idea of working with a band for some time and thought it would be interesting to write songs for other artists to perform. But in 1978, Patti Smith came to California on tour with her band, and Jim accompanied her to San Diego.
A conflict arose with her opening act, so she appeared on stage and introduced Jim as "the guy who taught me how to write poetry." Jim came on stage and rapped/ranted his lyrics with Patti and her band behind him. The crowd went nuts, and a rock star was born.