Poetic Obituaries: It was not a simple story of sporting excellence;

instead [Jim] Carroll's adolescence descended into a litany of late-night delinquency and hustling for heroin in Times Square.

When an excerpt from this memoir was published in The Paris Review in 1970 it was greeted by the literary world as a sensation. By then he was already a well-known figure on the New York poetry scene; he had published his first book of poetry, Organic Trains, when he was 17, and gained plaudits from Beat Generation heroes such as William S Burroughs (who described him as a "born writer"), Jack Kerouac and Ted Berrigan.

from Telegraph: Jim Carroll

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