Runaway Dream

Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision

By Louis P. Masur

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.

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.

Reviews for Runaway Dream:

“In Runaway Dream, Louis P. Masur, a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., dissects the making of the album and the legacy it has left behind with the meticulous eye of a scholar and the unabashed affection of a true fan.”—Associated Press. The AP story ran in dozens of papers, including Newsday, Times-Picayune, San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo News .

“Masur, as his title suggests, has ‘an affinity for the American themes that permeate [Springsteen’s] work,’ and his book is essentially an extended cultural essay about those.”—Chicago Tribune “With Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision, Masur again focuses on a single work of art and its cultural context, and the book shares many strengths with his previous one. The prose remains direct and uncluttered, the research extensive.”—Barnes and Noble Review

“Well-thought-out … After briefly examining Springsteen’s early life and work, Masur details the painstaking making of the album, analyzes each song’s lyrics and musicality, discusses the album’s reception and what he refers to as its spatial and temporal ‘geography,’ and relates its impact and continued resonance.”—Library Journal

“Students of popular music who know little if anything about Springsteen will find much to appreciate here, as will also, of course, Springsteen’s many fans.”—June Sawyers, Booklist (starred)

“A cultural historian with a penchant for choosing specific subjects (the year 1831, baseball’s first world series, a famous photograph from the Boston busing crisis of the 1970s) and situating them against the larger background of their times, [Lou Masur] combines scholarly rigor and journalistic accessibility. These talents are vividly on display in Runaway Dream, which uses Born to Run as a synecdoche for understanding Springsteen's career as a whole.”—Jim Cullen

A review in HISTORY NEWS NETWORK.

Lou also wrote an essay in HISTORY NEWS NETWORK.

The PRINCETON PACKET ran a feature on Runaway Dream.

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Runaway Dream

Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision