Keith Haring Journals

Keith Haring Journals collects the artist's private writing from 1977 until shortly before his death in 1990, a first-person record that runs alongside the drawings for which he became famous.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition reprints the journals in full across 464 pages, illustrated with ninety black-and-white reproductions of Haring's work and previously unpublished Polaroids, with a new foreword by Shepard Fairey and Robert Farris Thompson's original introduction. The entries move from Haring's arrival in New York and his early subway drawings through the School of Visual Arts years, the Club 57 and Pop Shop period, and his 1988 AIDS diagnosis, in his own unfiltered voice rather than as retrospective narrative.

Haring (1958–1990) turned the New York City subway system into a public canvas with chalk drawings before moving into painting, murals and the Pop Shop, building an image vocabulary of radiant babies, barking dogs and dancing figures that became inseparable from 1980s downtown culture. The journals, first published by Viking in 1996, remain the primary written source for how he understood his own work and the AIDS crisis that shaped his final years.