Writer Jim Carroll dead at 60

NEW YORK, Sept. 14 (UPI) -- Poet, songwriter and "The Basketball Diaries" author Jim Carroll has died of a heart attack at his home in New York, his ex-wife said. He was 60.

Rosemary Carroll confirmed Carroll's death last Friday to The New York Times.

"I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation.

The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty," singer Patti Smith told The Times Sunday about Carroll, with whom she and famous photographer Robert Mapplethorpe lived in the early 1970s.

In addition to his writing, the New York native was also a musician, who formed the Jim Carroll Band in the late 1970s. The group's 1980 release "Catholic Boy'' is regarded by some as the last great punk album. He wrote songs for Blue Oyster Cult and Boz Scaggs, as well, the newspaper noted.

Times critic Stephen Holden described Carroll in 1982 as "not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet."

Carroll also penned the 1973 book of poems, "Living at the Movies,'' recalled his time co-habitating with Smith and Mapplethorpe in "Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973," contributed dialogue for artist Andy Warhol's films and worked as a studio assistant for the painter Larry Rivers, The Times said.