Just Kids - Hardcover

Smith, Patti

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 2072738520 ISBN 13: 9782072738524

Publisher: GALLIMARD, 2017

Synopsis

'It was the summer that Coltrane died. The summer Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames and China exploded the H-bomb. There were riots in Newark and marches against the war in Vietnam. The world was on the brink of change. It was the summer of love. And the summer of a chance encounter that would change the course of my life. It was the summer I met Robert.' Just Kids is the story of two innocents who shed sheltered lives and braved the city in search of art and freedom. In each other Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith found kindred spirits and pursued their mutual dreams, from Brooklyn to the Chelsea Hotel into the world. Each would eventually reach the pinnacle of artistic achievement and their vow to always care for one another survived painful trials and separations. Mapplethorpe's unforgettable portrait of Smith for the cover of Horses forever fuses their indelible mark on our culture. Intimate and broadly evocative of New York in the early 70s, Just Kids - part romance, part elegy - is finally about friendship in the truest sense, and the artist's calling.

About this title

Review:

'With a memoirist's sleight of hand, Patti Smith recaptures
two wondrously malleable young spirits...' -- Scotland on Sunday, January 2010

'Before Maplethorpe died ... Smith promised him that she would write their story. Just Kids is the fulfilment of that promise: a touching tribute to their love as well as an incisive account of being young, ambitious and artistic in Seventies New York ... She pours that sorrow and that maturity into this heartfelt, illuminating book.' -- Telegraph, February 2010

`The most beautiful, incredible autobiography - it will make you ache for a time and a place that you probably never knew, New York in the 1970s' --Nick Hornby

From the Back Cover:

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.

Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous--the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.

Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

About this edition

• Publisher: GALLIMARD
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 2072738520
• ISBN 13: 9782072738524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352