Prince

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.
Prince was a musical genius, one of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular, and acclaimed musicians in history. He 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.

The Beautiful Ones is 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.

The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring's riveting and moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final months--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--and annotations that provide context to each of the book's images.

This work is not just a tribute to Prince, but an original and energizing literary work, full of Prince's ideas and vision, his voice and image, his undying gift to the world.

We will never see the full memoir that Prince intended to write, but this is the closest readers will ever get to the enigmatic genius, in his own voice.
HIGHLY ANTICIPATED: Prince fans have been eagerly awaiting this memoir ever since Prince first announced it at a private show months before his death.
CONTAINS HANDWRITTEN MEMOIR PAGES WRITTEN BY PRINCE: The core of the book are the handwritten memoir pages that Prince wrote in his own incandescent, vivid, witty and poetic voice.
BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED, FULL-COLOR BOOK: The book is gorgeously designed and features 100 photos, most of which have never before been published.
AN ENGROSSING READING EXPERIENCE: The book is, ultimately, a book to be read. Prince's own prose sits at its heart, but the introduction by Dan Piepenbring, the young writer Prince selected to collaborate on the project, is on its own a beautiful memoir of a relationship between a young writer and an iconic artist.