Buried Alive. The Biography of Janis Joplin
New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973. Early printing. Octavo, publisher's black cloth over mustard paper covered boards, spine gilt, red endpapers, original photo-illustrated dust jacket.
"I was just thinking...I wonder what they’ll say about me after I die." Early printing of Myra Friedman’s classic biography of the chaotic rise and notorious fall of one of the most famous rock singers of the 1960s. The book traces Janis Joplin’s short career – which lasted less than five years before it was cut short by her heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven – while also creating a panorama of the lonely, soul-searching, communion-hungry times that Joplin lived in, and the way in which she captured their spirit. Myra Friedman was a close friend of Joplin’s and worked as her publicist for three years, up until the singer’s death in 1970. Controversially, Friedman narrates the story herself, reflecting her personal obsession and intimate relationship with Joplin, whose egoism and neediness she unsparingly chronicles. The biography is as much about the 60s as it is about Joplin herself, and Midge Decter, reviewing it in the New York Times, wrote mournfully that "To know who Janis Joplin was to know a good deal...about the epidemic of antic despair that carried off so many of our children in the late 1960s." With 12 pages of black-and-white photos. Third printing, issued the same yar as the first. Owner inscription to front endpaper. Light sunning to spine-ends; unclipped dust jacket with some chipping to spine-ends, and some edgewear. Good. Item #7912
$35.00