The Basketball Diaries

Jim Carroll

Penguin Books, 1995 - Biography & Autobiography - 210 pages

The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960s, set during his coming-of-age from 12 to 15, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving streets of New York City. During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence. Here is Carroll prowling New York City--playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, getting hooked, and searching for something pure.

About the author

As a teenager, Jim Carroll won a basketball scholarship to Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he discovered a love of writing and began spending time at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in the East Village. While at Trinity, he led a life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. He published a limited-edition pamphlet of poems, Organic Trains (1967) while still in his teens. He briefly attending Wagner College and Columbia University, but soon found his way to Andy Warhol's Factory, where he contributed dialogue for Warhol's films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for the painter Larry Rivers. He left New York in 1973 to escape drugs and settled in Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco. He is best known for The Basketball Diaries, the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978. In 1995, it was adapted into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. His other works include 4 Ups and 1 Down; Living at the Movies; Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973; The Book of Nods; Fear of Dreaming; and Void of Course, 1994-1997. In the late 1970's, he formed the Jim Carroll Band. Their albums include Catholic Boy (1980), Dry Dreams (1982) and I Write Your Name (1984). He also wrote lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult and Boz Scaggs. He died from a heart attack on September 11, 2009 at the age of 60.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Basketball Diaries; A Penguin Book: Nature/Autobiography
• Author: Jim Carroll
• Edition: 2, reprint
• Publisher: Penguin Books, 1995
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Jun 10, 2008
• ISBN: 0140249990, 9780140249996
• Length: 210 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts; Biography & Autobiography / General; Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures