Prince: The Beautiful Ones

Prince & Dan Piepenbring

I want my first book to be better than my first album but I’m a lot smarter than I was then.

Summoning 200 music reporters and book industry insiders to Manhattan’s club Avenue on 19 March 2016, Prince delivered a tantalising and unanticipated announcement. Standing on the club’s balcony, he declared he was working on his memoir: “The good people at Random House have made me an offer that I can’t refuse”.

Prince continued to work on the manuscript right up until his death on 21 April that year – just one month after that announcement, which took both the music and printed media industries by surprise. Prince became ever more reflective in the latter stages of his life and was very eager to tell his life’s story in his own words. The prospect of such a book, by a man who spoke so little about his personal recollections was sadly cut short by his sudden death with so precious few pages completed by that time.

The autobiography, originally intended to cover his life right up until his Super Bowl appearance of 2007, was due for publication in the autumn of 2017 and although the work was therefore unfinished at the time of his death, approximately 60 completed pages were found on his personal computer during the inventory of his Paisley Park estate. What Prince completed recounts his life pre-stardom. The Beautiful Ones is Prince’s original working title for the memoir and is reworked into four sections over 288 pages, by editor Dan Piepenbring. It chronicles from Prince’s own words the birth and rise of the star’s early career.

Divided into four parts, the book features never before published photos and scrapbook material from Prince’s personal collection, and with one section of the containing the original unedited manuscript in full. The final section contains an early outline of plans for the shooting of a movie, then titled Dreams before famously becoming Purple Rain. The Beautiful Ones is published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Visit this special page for our The Beautiful Ones review.

Synopses

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.

Data

Authors

Prince & Dan Piepenbring

Publisher

Spiegel & Grau

Released

29 October 2019

Format

Hardback

ISBN

9780399589652