A short life of the author
Patti Smith (b. 30 December 1946) is an American artist whose work has spanned — and connected — music, poetry, visual art, and prose memoir with a consistency and seriousness of purpose that has no real parallel in contemporary culture. She is known primarily as a musician — the “punk poet laureate” whose debut album Horses (1975) fused rock and roll with French Symbolist poetry and opened the door for punk — but her literary career is substantial and, since Just Kids (2010), has reached an audience far larger than her music ever did. That memoir — about her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the New York of the late 1960s and 1970s — won the National Book Award and is one of the great American memoirs of artistic formation.
Life and Career
Smith was born in Chicago, grew up in a working-class family in southern New Jersey, and moved to New York in 1967, where she lived at the Chelsea Hotel, worked at the Strand Bookstore, and became part of the downtown art world that included Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Her literary heroes — Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Blake, Genet — shaped both her music and her writing. She has said that she always considered herself a poet who happened to become a rock singer, not the other way around.
Her early poetry collections — Witt (1973), Kodak (1972), and Ha! Ha! Houdini! (1977) — were published in small editions and are now scarce. Her music career, beginning with the Horses album (1975) and continuing through Easter (1978), Wave (1979), and later albums, made her one of the most influential figures in rock history.
Babel (1978) — a collection of poetry and prose — and Woolgathering (1992) — a slender, lyrical book of prose meditations on childhood — represent her writing between the early poetry and the memoirs. The Coral Sea (1996) — a prose poem written as an elegy for Mapplethorpe after his death from AIDS in 1989 — is one of her most sustained literary works: a meditation on death, photography, and the voyage of Rimbaud.
Just Kids (2010) is Smith’s masterpiece — and one of the finest American memoirs of the twenty-first century. It tells the story of her relationship with Mapplethorpe from their meeting in 1967, through their years of poverty and artistic ambition at the Chelsea Hotel, to their divergent paths (she into rock, he into photography and the gay leather scene) and his death. The book’s power lies in Smith’s ability to render their mutual devotion — romantic, artistic, familial — with a simplicity and tenderness that transcend the sensationalism of the CBGB/Warhol/punk mythology. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
M Train (2015) — her second memoir — is a more diffuse, meditative book about loss, coffee, travel, and the objects and places that accumulate meaning over a life. It follows Smith through cafés in New York and around the world, to the graves of literary heroes (Genet, Plath, Mishima), and through her interior landscape of memory and grief. The book’s structure mimics the drift of consciousness — associative, nonlinear, punctuated by photographs — and its emotional register is autumnal rather than youthful.
Year of the Monkey (2019) continued in the same meditative mode, blending dream, memory, and travel during the year 2016. A Book of Days (2022) — a photographic diary — extended her practice of combining text and image.
Themes and Style
Smith writes about artistic vocation — the call to make art, the sacrifices it demands, and the sustaining power of creative friendship. Her prose is lyrical, incantatory, and deeply personal, drawing on the Romantic and Symbolist traditions that also inform her music. She writes about objects (a coat, a camera, a cup of coffee) with the attentiveness of a poet, investing them with emotional and symbolic weight.
Her literary voice is distinctive: earnest without being naive, spiritual without being religious, devoted to beauty without being precious. She writes like someone who has spent her life in the company of Rimbaud and Burroughs and has absorbed their example without imitating their styles.
Critical Standing
Just Kids made Smith one of the most celebrated memoirists in America, reaching readers who had never heard her music. M Train confirmed that the literary career was not a one-book phenomenon. She occupies a unique position in American culture — a figure respected equally in the worlds of rock music, visual art, and literature.
Key Works
- Just Kids (2010)
- M Train (2015)
- Year of the Monkey (2019)
- The Coral Sea (1996)
Collecting Smith
Smith’s early poetry chapbooks — Witt (1973, Gotham Book Mart), Kodak (1972, Middle Earth Books) — are extremely scarce and bring $200–$1,000. Just Kids (2010, Ecco) first edition brings $30–$80; signed copies are available from her frequent readings and are modestly priced. Her art prints and photographs are also collected.