Jim Carroll: 'Basketball Diaries' author dies

Jim Carroll: 'Basketball Diaries' author dies

Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker, has died of a heart attack at his Manhattan home on September 11th, 2009. He was 60. His ex-wife Rosemary Carroll told the New York Times.

Carroll was an author, poet, autobiographer and punk musician. He was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work "The Basketball Diaries", which was made into the 1995 film of the same name with Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll. "The Basketball Diaries" was published in 1978.

Carroll was also a basketball player throughout his grade school and high school career.

The author wrote "The Basketball Diaries" in 1978. It's an autobiographical book, in which he wrote of his life as a teenager in New York City's hard drug culture. Diaries is an edited collection of the diaries he kept between the ages of twelve and sixteen, detailing his sexual experiences, high school basketball career, and his addiction to heroin, which began when he was 13.

Jim Carroll's poetry career started even earlier. He was 17 when he first received recognition for his poems, especially for "Organic Trains" in 1967 and then "4 Ups and 1 Down" in 1970.

Among his other works are "Living at the Movies" (1973), "The Book of Nods" (1986), "Fear of Dreaming" (1993) and "Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997" (1998).