The definitive biography on Janis Joplin. Out of the Texas-Louisiana swamps Janis Joplin wailed the blues like no one has ever dared. She was the first rock star of the 1960s counterculture, a fashion trendsetter in San Francisco's back-to-the-roots movement that overtook the world, and a prisoner of an ultimately doomed search for happiness in sex, drugs, money, and fame. But to those who knew and loved her intimately, she was Pearl. Ace celebrity biographer Ellis Amburn reveals the truth of the rock legend, including her troubled childhood in a backwater Texas town where her classmates punished her for her individuality, to her propelled stardom, to affairs with figures such as Jim Morrison, Kris Kristofferson, and Jimi Hendrix, and eventually to her binges, egotism, insecurities, and other forces that drove her through a short, impulsive life, to her death from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven.
