James Dennis Carroll (August 1, 1949 – September 11, 2009)[1] was an American author, poet, and punk musician. Carroll was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which inspired a 1995 film of the same title that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll, and his 1980 song "People Who Died" with the Jim Carroll Band.
Carroll was born to a working-class family of Irish descent, and grew up in New York City's Lower East Side. When he was about 11 (in the sixth grade) his family moved north to Inwood in Upper Manhattan.[2] He was taught by the LaSalle Christian Brothers. In fall 1963, he entered Rice High School in Harlem, but was soon awarded a scholarship to the elite Trinity School.[2] He attended Trinity from 1964 to 1968.[3]
Carroll was a basketball star in high school, but also developed an addiction to heroin.[3] He financed his drug habit by engaging in prostitution in the vicinity of 53rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.[4] Carroll briefly attended Wagner College and Columbia University.[5] He dated Patti Smith.[3]
While still in high school, Carroll published his first collection of poems, Organic Trains. Already attracting the attention of the local literati, his work began appearing in the Poetry Project's magazine The World in 1967. Soon his work was being published in elite literary magazines like Paris Review in 1968,[2] and Poetry the following year. In 1970, his second collection of poems, 4 Ups and 1 Down was published, and he started working for Andy Warhol. At first, he was writing film dialogue and inventing character names; later on, Carroll worked as the co-manager of Warhol's Theater. Carroll's first publication by a mainstream publisher (Grossman Publishers), the poetry collection Living at the Movies, was published in 1973.[8]
In 1978, Carroll published The Basketball Diaries, an autobiographical book concerning his life as a teenager in New York City's hard drugculture. Diaries is an edited collection of the diaries he kept during his high school years; it details his sexual experiences, his high school basketball career, and his addiction to heroin.[4][9][10]
In 1987, Carroll wrote a second memoir, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971–1973, continuing his autobiography into his early adulthood in the New York City music and art scene as well as his struggle to kick his drug habit.[11]
After working as a musician, Carroll returned to writing full-time in the mid-1980s and began to appear regularly on the spoken-word circuit. Starting in 1991, Carroll performed readings from his then-in-progress first novel, The Petting Zoo.[12]
In 1995, Canadian filmmaker John L'Ecuyer adapted "Curtis's Charm", a short story from Carroll's 1993 book Fear of Dreaming, into the film Curtis's Charm.[13]
In 1978, after he moved to California to get a fresh start since overcoming his heroin addiction, Carroll formed Amsterdam, a new wave/punk rock group, with encouragement from Patti Smith, with whom he once shared an apartment in New York City, along with Robert Mapplethorpe.[14] The musicians were Steve Linsley (bass), Wayne Woods (drums - he had previously been in hard rock band, Estus), Brian Linsley and Terrell Winn (guitars). He performed a spoken word piece with the Patti Smith Group in San Diego when the support band dropped out at the last moment.[citation needed]
Carroll became sober in the 1970s.[3] After moving to California, he met Rosemary Klemfuss; the couple married in 1978.[4] The marriage ended in divorce, but the two remained friends.[3]
