Patti Smith News: Patti Smith’s New York Love Affair: An Excerpt From “Just Kids”

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On July 3rd, 1967, Patti Smith �" then 20 years old, a teachers-college dropout from New Jersey with shotgun passions for rock & roll and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud �" boarded a bus in Philadelphia and, a couple of hours later, got off in New York to start life anew. “No one expected me,” she says in a new memoir, Just Kids. “Everything awaited me.” That included Robert Mapplethorpe, also 20, a former altar boy and an aspiring artist from Long Island.

Smith met him that first day in New York, at an apartment in Brooklyn, and again later...