The Basketball Diaries | The Poet as Rebel
France holds an M.S.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in history from Temple University. He is a librarian, college counselor, and teacher at University Liggett School and teaches writing at Macomb Community College near Detroit, Michigan. In the following essay, France discusses both historical context and the tradition of the poet as rebel in The Basketball Diaries.
The primary value of Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries is its contextual vision of time (from the fall of 1963 to the summer of 1966) and place (New York City and its environs) and its carrying onward of a dramatic cultural strand that presents the (in this case young) artist as incorrigible rebel. The importance of the historical content highlighted in the published text is heightened by comparison with the financially successful movie adaptation, starring actor Leonardo Di Caprio that was released in 1995. In the latter version, all references to the 1960s are excised; the...
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