The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife.
As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to The Basketball Diaries, the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.