THE BASKETBALL DIARIES is a classic about a young hipster growing up on the mean streets of New York City. The book brought Jim Carroll enormous fame in the underground environment. Jack Kerouac, having first read excerpts of Carroll’s sometimes funny and sometimes scary chronicle about the life of an urban teenager from thirteen to sixteen years old, decided to write: “Thirteen-year-old Jim Carroll writes prose better than 89% of modern writers.” Later, excerpts from the work, published at the dawn of the seventies in The Paris Review, caused a sensation - and continue to do so to this day.