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In 2009, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how Born to Run, Springsteen’s extraordinary autobiography, began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.
He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as “The Big Bang”: seeing Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work, and shows us why the song “Born to Run” reveals more than we previously realized.
Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs (“Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “The Rising,” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.
DAN STONE has worked as a landscaper, bartender, middle school teacher, writer, and editor. A native of Syracuse, New York, Stone is the founder and editor-in-chief of Radio Silence, a magazine of literature and rock & roll. He worked for six years as a program manager and documentary producer at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he wrote and produced 25 radio documentaries and helped create and run the national initiatives Poetry Out Loud, Shakespeare in American Communities, and The Big Read. Stone interviewed Elvis Costello for City Arts & Lectures in 2015.