We’re digging through our vault of extraordinary music history to bring you a collection of some of Doors Lead Singer Jim Morrison’s all-time favorite books, including everything from Beat novelist William S. burroughs to romantic poet william blake. is an essential reading list for any budding lizard king.
in the doors, drummer john densmore’s 1990 autobiography, riders in the storm, makes a tongue-in-cheek claim that “nietzsche killed jim morrison,” and while it’s incendiary and likely to make you pick up the book of Densmore, it is actually much more likely that the controversial philosopher and scholar Nietzsche also brought him to life. Jim Morrison was not only the Lizard King and the enigmatic lead singer of the Doors, but he was also a poet and a lover of literature to the core.
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morrison steeped himself in literature from an early age and spent much of his formative years with his nose buried in one book or another, transferring his passion for prose into his poetry and songs later in life. he gave him his undoubted talent for poignant and poetic lyrics, and also allowed his fans to create a wild mythology around his character and intelligence.
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During the singer’s adolescence, as an act of literary display, he would even ask his friends to pick up books from his side bookcase and ask them to recite a line or two from any page of any book. Morrison could then name the book and the book’s author before they finished the paragraph. a clever trick that showed his love for the written word.
Radical Reads reports how a high school friend remembered Morrison as an outcast who took a deep interest in his reading: “He had tons of books in his basement room and I would go in there and look at them and I had no idea of what most of that stuff meant,” they detail. Morrison devoured that stuff when he was a teenager, and he was in another world, and you have to wonder how that affected him.
continued the friend, acknowledging morrison’s literary prestige: “the point is that he was so far along in terms of literature that he took in and really seemed to become what he read at times.”
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His English teacher also shared this view of Morrison’s burgeoning literary mind and eccentric preferences: “everything he read was completely out of the ordinary. He had another professor go to the Library of Congress to check if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed or if he was making them up. English books on demonology from the 16th and 17th centuries…other children were reading authors featured in our anthology, and Jim was reading Burton’s studies of Arab sexuality.”
This tortuous literary path of morrison’s journey will see him infatuated with subversive and confusing subject matter, enjoying the depth of provocation. such as nietzsche, shamanic teachings, the beat classics (unsurprisingly), mythology, poetry of the romantics, as well as classical tragedies and fallen heroism. It’s racked up a favorite reading list that lets you get inside the mind of Jim Morrison.
It is also a collection of books and poetry that undoubtedly influenced the singer’s lyrics and her own poetic quest. Morrison was even known to hand out her handwritten poetry before concerts so he could share her inner workings with fans. Even the band’s name, The Doors, is taken from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which is itself a reference to a William Blake poem.
Below is a list of the books and teachings that would shape the mind and work of door leader Jim Morrison before his untimely death in 1971 at the age of 27. We’ve even added a little more with Morrison’s ‘Ode to Nietzsche’.
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jim morrison’s favorite books:
- the theater and its double by antonin artaud
- giovanni’s room by james baldwin
- complete poetry & prose by william blake
- life versus death by norman o. brown
- naked lunch by william s. burroughs
- nova express by william s. burroughs
- the hero with a thousand faces by joseph campbell
- the fall of albert camus
- the plague of albert camus
- the stranger by albert camus
- crowds and power by elias canetti
- go by john clellon holmes
- heart of darkness by joseph conrad
- gasoline by gregory corso
- lonigan tacks by james t. farrell
- a coney island of the mind by lawrence ferlinghetti
- howl by allen ginsberg
- mythology: timeless tales of gods and heroes by edith hamilton
- the doors of perception by aldous huxley
- a portrait of the artist as a young man by james joyce
- dubliners by james joyce
- ulysses by james joyce
- big sur by jack kerouac
- doctor sax by jack kerouac
- the dharma bums by jack kerouac
- on the road by jack kerouac
- the underground by jack kerouac
- why are we in vietnam? by norman mailer
- the adept by michael mcclure
- death is a star by agnes michaux
- the power elite of c. wright mills
- the birth of friedrich nietzsche’s tragedy
- dionysus: myth and cult of walter f. Otto
- Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
- Wilhelm Reich’s Orgasm Performance
- David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd
- Arthur’s Complete Works rimbaud
- the strange last journey of donald crowhurst by nicholas tomalin & ron hall
- the outsider by colin wilson