Patti Smith Books In Order

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Why I Write Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Patti Smith
Patti Smith is a visual artist, a performer, and a writer. She became one of the influential components of the New York City punk rock movement with her debut album “Horses”, released in the year 1975. Patti’s most widely known song is “Because the Night”, which she co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen. She was born December 30, 1946 in Chicago, Illinois. Her mom is Beverly Smith (a jazz singer turned waitress) and Grant Smith (who worked at a Honeywell plant as a machinist).

Patti was the oldest of four kids, and when she was four years old her family moved to Germantown, Philadelphia from Chicago. Later, they would move again to Pitman, New Jersey and again to The Woodbury Gardens part of Deptford Township, New Jersey.

Smith was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and had a Bible education and a strong religious upbringing. When she was a teen, she left organized religion because it was too confining for her. Now that she is an adult, she feels that all religious dogmas are laws made by man that you can either choose to abide by or not.

From this early time, she was exposed to her early records. This includes Harry Belafonte’s “Shrimp Boats”, “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, and Patience and Prudence’s “The Money Tree”, which she got from her mother. She went to work in a factory after she graduated from Deptford Township High School in the year 1964.

In the year 1967, she left Glassboro State College (what is now Rowan University) and moved out to Manhattan. While she was working at a bookstore with Janet Hamill, her friend and poet, she met Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer. Robert and Patti had an intense romantic relationship, which was filled with turbulence. This is due since to the poverty they faced as well as Robert’s struggles with his own sexuality.

She spent the early part of the seventies performing, writing, and painting, as one of the members of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In the year 1971 she performed a play that she wrote with Sam Shepard, called “Cowboy Mouth”. Patti also wrote several other poems for him, including material about her relationship with Sam.

During this time, she also wrote rock journalism pieces, a few of which got published in Creem and Rolling Stone.

The b-side to her first single, called “Piss Factory” described the helpless anger she felt while she worked on an assembly line in a factory. It also talks about the salvation she found in the form of a stolen book, Illuminations by a nineteenth century French poet named Arthur Rimbaud.

Arthur Rimbaud was the subject of many girlish daydreams for Patti, who found him to be like her boyfriend. He is also one of her biggest artistic influences when she was younger.

She still considers Robert to be one of the most important people in her entire life. Until he died in 1989, they were always friends. The photographs he took of her became covers of many of the Patti Smith Group albums. Patti also wrote essays for many of his books, starting from one, from his request, for Flowers, a book released after he died.

She has two kids, Jackson and Jesse, both with her husband Fred Smith, the former guitar player for MC5. Patti joked that the only reason she married him was so that she would not have to change her last name. She had another child that she gave up for adoption when she was eighteen years old.

Patti’s memoir, called “Just Kids” was given a National Book Award. She was given the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts des Lettres by the French Republic. Patti also received a 2011 Polar Music Prize. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the year 2007.

“Just Kids” is Patti’s memoir, and was released in the year 2010. It was the summer of riots and love, the summer that Coltrane died, and the summer a chance encounter that occurred in Brooklyn led two youngsters on the path of initiation, art, and devotion.

Patti Smith would evolve both as a performer and poet, while Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in enthusiasm and innocence, they made their way around the city from Forty-second Street to Coney Island, and eventually they went to Max’s Kansas City, where Andy Warhol’s contingent held court.

In the year 1969, the two set up shop at the Hotel Chelsea and quickly entered a community made up of the famous and infamous alike, the colorful fringe as well as the influential artists of the time. The period is one of heightened awareness, when the worlds of rock and roll, sexual politics, art, and poetry collide and explode. Within this milieu, this pair make a pact to take care of one another. Romantic, scrappy, committed to create, and fueled by mutual drives and dreams, they provide and prod each other during their hungry times.

“Year of the Monkey” is a non-fiction book, and was released in the year 2019. After a series of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti tramps the coast of Santa Cruz about to go off on an entire year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by either time or logic, she pulls her readers into her private wonderland, without any design yet heeding signs. Like the talking sign that hangs right up above her, prodding and dueling like the Cheshire Cat.

In the month of February, a bizarre lunar year starts, and with it are inescapable sorrow, unexpected turns, and heightened mischief. Patti Smith, who is always exploring, curious, tracking thoughts, and writing the year is one of reckoning with all of the changes in life. Aging, loss, and a dramatic shift in America’s political landscape.

She melds with her own Dreamscape with the Western landscape. She goes from Southern California off to the Arizona desert. Then it is to a Kentucky farm playing the part of amanuensis of a buddy in crisis, then she visits a valued mentor in their hospital room. Then Smith goes back to imagined places and places remembered.