SOURCE: A review of The Basketball Diaries, in American Book Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, February, 1980, p. 9.

In the following review, James lauds The Basketball Diaries.

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll is a literary miracle; a description of the formation of an artistic sensibility written by the artist, not in retrospect, but in the process. It is a portrait of the artist not just as a young man but as a child, written by the child, and thus free of the mature artist’s complicated romantic love of himself in pain. It also works engrossingly well as a narrative, The Catcher in the Rye for real, for bigger stakes.

The Basketball Diaries is an anecdotal journal kept by Carroll from the age of twelve to fifteen, more or less from the first time he shot heroin until he showed up at Ted Berrigan’s poetry workshop, a basketball in...