Although many today only know Carroll's prose writings, he made his start in the literary world as a poet. Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll (1993) includes poems from Living at the Movies (1973) and The Book of Nods (1986) as well as several more recent poems. This collection gives a portrait of Carroll as an artist in various stages of his writing career.

Carroll's Forced Entries (1987) continues the autobiographical story of the author's drug addiction, starting five years after the last entry in The Basketball Diaries. However, in his first diary collection, Carroll detailed how he became a heroin addict. In this one, he describes his fight to overcome his addiction.

In 1954, Aldous Huxley, a well-known author, published The Doors of Perception, a small, journalistic book detailing his experiences while under the influence of mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug. First-person...