Jim Carroll, Musician & Author of The Basketball Diaries, Dies at 60

Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker who penned The Basketball Diaries, passed away on Friday. He was 60.

He died from a heart attack in his Manhattan home, his ex-wife Rosemary Carroll told the New York Times.

In the 1970s, Carroll was a fixture of the burgeoning downtown New York art scene, where he hung out with artists like Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Larry Rivers, and Robert Mapplethorpe. His life was shaped by drug use, which he wrote about extensively.

Carroll also published several poetry collections, while his 1980 album, Catholic Boy, has been hailed as a landmark punk record, and he became known for one of its songs, "People Who Died."

But it was The Basketball Diaries, his autobiographical story of life as a sports star at Trinity, an elite private high school in Manhattan, that brought him his widest audience. The son of a bar owner, Carroll attended the school on a basketball scholarship.

The book, which began life as a journal, was initially published in 1978 and then became even more popular, especially on college campuses, when it was issued as a mass-market paperback two years later. A 1995 film adaptation starred Leonardo DiCaprio.

His poetry career began even earlier. Carroll was in his teens when he first received recognition for his poetry, particularly Organic Trains in 1967 and then 4 Ups and 1 Down in 1970. Among his other works are collections like The Book of Nods (1986), Fear of Dreaming (1993), and Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997 (1998).

Carroll moved to California in 1973, where he met his future wife Rosemary Klemfuss. They later divorced.

It was Patti SmithPatti Smith who encouraged his music, and he formed the Jim CarrollJim Carroll Band. Among his other albums were the less successful Dry Dreams (1982) and I Write Your Name (1984).