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Just Kids

Patti Smith

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Just Kids
 

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Patti Smith

Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock. Her seminal album Horses, bearing Robert Mapplethorpe’s renowned photograph, has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. She has recorded 12 albums.

Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. In 2002, the Andy Warhol Museum launched Strange Messenger, a retrospective exhibit of her drawings, silk screens, and photographs. Her drawings, photographs, and installations were shown in a comprehensive exhibit in 2008 at the Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris.

Her books include Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence.

In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, the highest honor awarded to an artist by the French Republic.

She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Smith married the late Fred Sonic Smith in Detroit in 1980. They had a son, Jackson, and a daughter, Jesse. Smith resides in New York City.



 

Backlist

Just Kids
Just Kids
Patti Smith
  • Hardcover
  • 9780066211312
  • 1/19/2010
  • $27.00 ($31.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
Auguries of Innocence
Auguries of Innocence
Patti Smith
  • Trade PB
  • 9780060832674
  • 6/10/2008
  • $15.99 ($19.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
 
Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006
Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006
Patti Smith
  • Trade PB
  • 9780060849719
  • 4/25/2006
  • $25.95 ($33.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
 

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Extras


Quotes

"One of the best things I've ever read in my life."


- Don Imus
"Tenderly evocative...it makes perfect sense for [Smith] to use a memoirist's sleight of hand...to recapture an eager, fervent and wondrously malleable young spirit. It also makes sense for her to cast off all verbal affectation and write in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry."


- Janet Maslin, New York Times
“Just Kids concerns the early years of their passionate friendship, a time that coincided with the beginning of the end of Manhattan’s last great bohemian age, when a couple with dreams of beatnik glory could live on day-old bread and cigarettes and paint fumes, all of which Smith evokes so precisely that one can smell the Nescafé boiling on a hot plate...More than a 1970s bohemian rhapsody, Just Kids is one of the best books ever written on becoming an artist—not the race for online celebrity and corporate sponsorship that often passes for artistic success these days, but the far more powerful, often difficult journey toward the ecstatic experience of capturing radiance of imagination on a page or stage or photographic paper. Jesus may have died for somebody’s sins, but Patti Smith lives and writes and sings for all of us.”


- Washington Post
“Smith’s intimate memoir is a tender elegy for the man with whom she had a two-decade-long relationship...Just Kids is astonishing on many levels, most notably for Smith’s lapidary prose...As a primer on self-discovery and the artist’s journey, Just Kids is as inspiring as Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. It reminds us that becoming an artist is a worthwhile and brave endeavor....There’s no need to ghettoize this book by praising it as an impressive memoir by a famous musician. It is simply one of the best memoirs to be published in recent years: inspiring, sad, wise and beautifully written.”
 


- San Francisco Chronicle
"A heartbreakingly sweet recollection of just that sort of vanished Bohemian life...Just as [Smith] stands out as an artiste in a movement based on collectivism, her singular voice gleams among rock memoirs as a work of literature."


- Boston Globe
"[Smith] gives us vivid snapshots of the people who offered the young artists encouragement and support...Her tender and evenhanded evocation of two driven innocents searching for voices of their own offers a welcome counterbalance to more lurid and sensational portraits of the late Mapplethorpe found elsewhere...this gently illuminating book earns a place alongside her best poems and songs."


- Detroit Free Press
“An utterly charming, captivating, intimate portrait of a late 1960s and early 1970s period of intense artistic ferment in downtown Manhattan significantly shaped and keenly observed by rock firebrand Smith...Just Kids presents a poet-rocker recounting the salad days in a clear, commanding prose voice that’s recognizably her own, but not quite so mysterious and mystical as the one heard in the music...Just Kids is a sweet story of two luminously talented outsiders awkwardly finding their way, together.”


- Philadelphia Inquirer
“The most compelling memoir by a rock artist since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One, written with intimacy and grace, filled with revelation about a romance that might seem inscrutable to anyone but the two who were once so passionate about each other and remained so passionate about each other’s work.”


- Chicago Tribune
“A moving portrait of the artist as a young woman, and a vibrant profile of Smith’s onetime boyfriend and lifelong muse, Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989...Just Kids is ultimately a wonderful portal into the dawn of Smith’s art.”


- Los Angeles Times
“The reckless, splendid circus of New York’s royal bohemia in the 1960s and '70s—rock idols, cowboy poets, Warhol Superstars—surrounds Smith in her heady recounting of a halcyon era. But the heart of Just Kids, a captivating memoir, is the lifelong love affair (first romantic, later creative and platonic) between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, before she became music’s punk poet laureate and he one of the art world’s most provocative and controversial figures. In her inimitable, lyrical style, Patti Smith recalls the pair’s coming together as young, monumentally broke dreamers: ‘’just kids.’’ What follows is both a poignant requiem (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS at age 43) and a radiant celebration of life. Grade: A.”


- Entertainment Weekly
“A shockingly beautiful book...a classic, a romance about becoming an artist in the city, written in a spare, simple style of boyhood memoirs like Frank Conroy’s Stop Time.”


- New York Magazine