Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision
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Overview
To millions of listeners, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run is much more than a rock-and-roll album-it’s a poetic explosion of freedom and frustration. It confirmed Springsteen’s status as a quintessential American performer: the rocker who, more than any other, gives voice to our hopes, fears, and aspirations. Runaway Dream chronicles the making of the album that launched Springsteen and his E Street Band into the firmament of American art, deftly sketching the ambition, history, and personalities that combined to create the enduring Born to Run.
Springsteen wanted Born to Run to be the greatest rock record ever made. For a musician with just two modest-selling LPs to his credit, it was an extraordinary ambition, and session by session, track by track, Masur shows just how much grit, as well as genius, went into realizing it. Runaway Dream offers an expert tour of the trials and triumphs of Springsteen’s work. In addition to the story of the album itself, Masur masterfully places Born to Run within American cultural history, showing why the girls, hot rods, and Jersey nights of the album still resonate, even for listeners born years after its release.
Springsteen wanted Born to Run to be the greatest rock record ever made. For a musician with just two modest-selling LPs to his credit, it was an extraordinary ambition, and session by session, track by track, Masur shows just how much grit, as well as genius, went into realizing it. Runaway Dream offers an expert tour of the trials and triumphs of Springsteen’s work. In addition to the story of the album itself, Masur masterfully places Born to Run within American cultural history, showing why the girls, hot rods, and Jersey nights of the album still resonate, even for listeners born years after its release.
A rich history of Springsteen’s greatest album, celebrating its themes of youth, escape, and possibility, just in time for the Boss’s sixtieth birthday.
BIRTHDAY BASH: Will publish on September 1, 2009, just two weeks before Springsteen’s 60th birthday and all the attendant publicity--Springsteen will also be on a national tour.
FAN’S PASSION: Masur combines celebrated skill as a historian with the relatability of a diehard, lifelong Boss fan.
UNIQUE APPROACH: Masur uses interviews, research, and personal history to create a one-of-a-kind history of a classic rock album that has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
An elegantly reasoned, wonderfully researched and deeply moving new book...Masur’s skill at teasing the symbolic resonance from the photo’s structure and composition is impressive, as is his treatment of the flag as national icon. He displays his real skill as a historian, however, in his remarkably clear and fair-minded synopses of tangled racial histories.
Masur writes in a refreshingly direct manner. He shuns specialized, academic language even as he interprets The Soiling of Old Glory and launches into an extended discussion of the role of the flag in American culture across the decades. He knows, moreover, the power of real-life narratives.
With his precise skills as a cultural historian, Masur probes deeper, analyzing the photograph’s role in the emotional collision of civil-rights activism with continued racism and the resulting changes in the community...
- Title: Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision
- Author: Louis P. Masur
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
- Print Publication Date: 2010
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781608191758, 9781608191017, 160819101X, 1608191753
- Resource ID: LLS:9781608191758
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:19:47Z
Louis P . Masur is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values at Trinity College in Hartford. Married with two children, he divides his time between Hartford and Highland Park, New Jersey. His previous books include The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America, 1831: Year of Eclipse, and Autumn Glory: Baseball's First World Series.