A respected American poet and author who enjoyed a side career as a rock singer,
Jim Carroll was born August 1, 1949 in New York City. While a scholarship
student at Trinity School in the 1960s he became both a talented basketball
player and a heroin addict. He also published his first collection of poetry. He
wrote about his high school years, including the hustling he did to feed his
drug habit, in the 1978 memoir The Basketball Diaries, which would be adapted
into a feature film nearly 20 years later. He put his drug addiction behind him
for good by the end of the seventies an...