Carroll: a ‘born writer’

Jim Carroll, whose death at the age of 60 was announced earlier this week, wore many labels during his intermittently sparkling career as a counter-culture figure: a punk musician, a beat poet, a restless bohemian. He was also condemned for wasting his gifts: like many other precocious talents, he suffered from the fact that his earliest full-length work, the autobiographical The Basketball Diaries, would also turn out to be his most famous. Not yet out of his teens when he wrote the journals on which the book was based, Carroll chronicled a descent that would mortify any parent of adolescent children: from all-American high school jock – he was an accomplished basketball player – to heroin-addicted outsider who was forced to turn to prostitution to support his habit.