Just Kids

In the early 1970s, two teenagers met in the Chelsea Hotel in New York — Patti Smith, a poet and artist who had arrived from New Jersey with nothing but ambition and some books, and Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer of extraordinary talent and complete conviction. Just Kids is the story of the years they spent together before fame arrived, and of the friendship that sustained them through the transition from beautiful nobodies to definitive cultural figures of their era.

Smith writes about this period — the poverty, the creativity, the Chelsea Hotel’s extraordinary cast of residents, the development of an artistic vision in the face of complete material precariousness — with the combination of lyrical precision and emotional honesty that characterises all her best work. Winner of the National Book Award.

One of the essential memoirs of artistic life in the twentieth century — a book that captures, better than any other, what it feels like to be young and serious and alive in a city that is itself alive. Published by Bloomsbury.