The journey from obscurity to rock-and-roll fantasy is not as important in this book as the internal journey from anxious urgency to some sort of self-forgiving peace.īorn in 1949, Springsteen was the eldest of three children, and the only son, in a working-class Catholic family in Freehold, New Jersey. He is still tortured and haunted, but he has gotten himself more or less together. He is a literate, artful, and even urbane writer (there is no way this book is ghosted) who has reaped the sorts of insights you get from more than three decades in therapy. Now he’s a 67-year-old multimillionaire with a mansion and horses. (1973) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) and on through The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Wrecking Ball (2012), Springsteen has often written songs in the voice of the unlettered working-class outsider, which he was.

Starting with Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. As a boy, Springsteen chewed his knuckles until they were covered with marble-size calluses. Springsteen entered a world of chaos and turned to guitars and amplifiers and lyrics to create order. People who choose rock and roll as their vocation are usually trying to break free from constraints, to smash things, to stir up a little turmoil in their souls. Three types of people, Fosdick observed, emerge from the struggle: those whose lives remain scattered and ineffectual those who focus on a low purpose, like money or status and those who, finding a vocation guided by a high purpose, corral their conflicting selves “sufficiently to make a concentrated impression on the world.”īruce Springsteen’s frank and gripping memoir, Born to Run, is an intimate portrait of one man’s lifelong attempt to follow that primary command. Over the years, our job is to integrate our many parts, which entails choosing the goals and tasks we consider most important. He argued that “the primary command of our being is, Get yourself together, and the fundamental sin is to be chaotic and unfocused.” We are all born, he wrote, with different selves, tastes, talents, fears, competing desires, and possibilities. In 1943, Harry Emerson Fosdick, then the pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church, published a book called On Being a Real Person.

Bruce born to run