Prince Memoir Release Date Announced
The long awaited memoir Prince was working on at the time of his death is coming out Oct. 29, 2019.
This work is not just a tribute to Prince, but according the book’s editor, Chris Jackson, is much more than that. The Beautiful Ones is a “genuinely moving and energizing literary work, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image.” Jackson continues, “It’s a treasure not just for Prince fans but for anyone who wants to see one of our greatest creative artists and original minds at work on his greatest creation: himself.”
Random House confirmed to The Associated Press that “The Beautiful Ones” will combine Prince unfinished manuscript with rare photos, scrapbooks and lyrics. First announced just weeks before his 2016 death, literary agent Esther Newberg stated that Prince had completed more than 50 handwritten pages at the time of his death. The final book is 288-pages and will include an introduction by New Yorker writer Dan Piepenbring, whom Prince had chosen as a collaborator. The memoir is an exclusive partnership with the Prince Estate.
″‘The Beautiful Ones’ is the deeply personal account of how Prince Rogers Nelson became the Prince we know: the real-time story of a kid absorbing the world around him and creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and the fame that would come to define him,” Random House announced.
Amazon describes The Beautiful Ones as the story of how Prince became Prince—a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is composed of the memoir he was writing before his tragic death, pages that brings us into Prince’s childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us into Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album released, through a scrapbook of Prince’s writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that take us up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain—the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, as he retells the autobiography we’ve seen in the first three parts as a heroic journey.
Framed by Piepenbring’s introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final months, the book is a coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time. The months before his passing was “a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated.” Piepenbring also makes annotations providing context to each of the book’s images.
Prince was a musical genius who died three years ago, on April 21, 2016 from an accidental overdose of fentanyl at the age of 57. One of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular, and acclaimed musicians in history, Prince was also a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of “Uptown” to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of “Paisley Park.” But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, the greatest pop star of his era.
