"By 28, he'd started and ended a vicious heroin habit, developed a reputation as a New York City sports prodigy, written a Pulitzer Prize-nominated collection of poems, and published 1978's The Basketball Diaries, a best-selling chronicle of addiction and youthful hedonism from ages 12-15 and an early exemplar of autofiction. The 1995 film adaptation would star Leonardo DiCaprio. Some people become cool; some people, like Jim Carroll, are born with it, a burdensome inheritance. Everybody wants a piece."
"Where do you go after you've become the king of Downtown? In 1973, fractures were forming in his social milieu: the Beats, like his friend Ted Berrigan, who'd hung on through the speed-fueled '60s, poets in varying states of sobriety, rock musicians like his erstwhile roommate and ex-girlfriend Patti Smith, and a crowd in Warhol's orbit who "were all into being self-destructive themselves.""
Jim Carroll emerged as a singular Downtown New York figure by age 28, combining poetry, prose, and music with notorious personal highs and lows. He started and ended a vicious heroin habit while gaining renown as a sports prodigy and as a writer, earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination and publishing The Basketball Diaries, a bestselling chronicle of addiction and youthful hedonism. The Basketball Diaries later became a 1995 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. By the mid-1970s Carroll distanced himself from an insular poetry scene and gravitated toward music, seeking intensified experience without legal or physical fallout. His 1980 debut fuses glam-rock swagger with slick '80s gloss and Downtown attitude.
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