“A first person account of how Prince became Prince.”
In what looks like being the publishing event of the year, Random House will finally release the long awaited Prince memoir The Beautiful Ones on Oct. 29, the publishing house announced today. The 288-page book will feature an introduction by Dan Piepenbring, a contributor to The New Yorker.
The announcement comes just a day after the three-year anniversary of the legendary singer’s death at 57 from an overdose of fentanyl in April 2016.
The publisher describes the book, which was first announced in 2016 prior to Prince’s death.: “From Prince himself comes the brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time – featuring never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death.”
According to Random House, The Beautiful Ones is the Minneapolis marvel’s own 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 will be broken into four parts: The first is composed of the memoir he was writing before his death, focusing on his “childhood world through his own lyrical prose.”
The second part chronicles Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album released, through a scrapbook of his writing and photos. The third section is Prince’s evolution through candid images that take us up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which is the focus of 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.”
Piepenbring’s introduction details his “short but profound collaboration” with Prince in the artist’s final months, with annotations that provide context to the book’s images.
The Beautiful Ones will be published under the Penguin Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau.
Steve Pafford
