The literary heroes that shaped Bruce Springsteen
“Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night
And they blew up his house, too.” – Bruce Springsteen, ‘Atlantic City’
Based on the quality of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics, there should never have been any doubt that The Boss had a literary mind, but the brilliant prose of his memoir, Born to Run, certainly confirmed that when it was released back in 2016. The breadth of his work has always paired and probed at the intersection of the human condition and American society in a manner akin to No Country for Old Men, rendered as a songwriter incarnate.
Springsteen has the unique knack of seamlessly placing triumph and despair in the same album; in fact, they often even pop up in a single verse. He is bold and potent when it comes to his subjects, and when he first broke onto the scene as a songwriter, Bob Dylan famously quipped: “He better be careful, or he might go through every word in the English language.”
‘Atlantic City’ is a prime example of his artistry, beginning with a literary opening line before perfectly pitting hope in a fight with a reality of dogged hardships in a poetic appraisal of working-class life, seasoned with enough specificity for it to feel real. It’s a song that shows he has learned from the masters when it comes to storytelling with a prescient edge.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a handful of key names in Springsteen’s library below and looked into how they’ve shaped him.
The literary heroes that shaped Bruce Springsteen:
Ron Kovic
”I wanna be a man again…I just wanna be a man again.”
Springsteen has always presented an uncompromising view of America. It’s a view that exhibits the same token that James Baldwin spoke of when he announced: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” One of the fundamental writers in forming much of Springsteen’s critique is Ron Kovic.
The Boss met the disabled Vietnam War veteran in 1978 after reading his books and following his tireless activism. He soon became friends with Kovic, with the vet inspiring ‘Shut Out the Light’ and ‘Born in the USA’. If those songs and Springsteen’s subsequent songwriting share anything with Kovic’s books, it’s the exposition of vulnerability presented as strength and bold honesty.
Flannery O’Connor
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
For many folks, including Nick Cave and the Coen brothers, O’Connor is the ultimate American writer. From the outside, she was a prim and proper, bespectacled, little churchgoer, so the fact that she wrote some of the most macabre and uncompromising stories of the 20th Century makes her work all the more intriguing and emboldens the messages she disseminates with verity and sincerity. This duality of character even shows itself as a construct within her work. A Good Man is Hard to Find is the brutal tale of a twisted murderer on the loose and a family road trip. The shocking collision of these two sides of America, and how they are closer than many would care to admit, is decidedly similar to some of Springsteen’s work, particularly the epic Nebraska.
”There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about,” he told Will Percy in 1998 regarding the influence O’Connor has had on him. ”They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she’d left that hole there, that hole that’s inside of everybody. There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own.”
John Steinbeck
“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
The aura of Steinbeck’s struggling American underclass always seemed to linger in the welter of Springsteen’s work, but then the spirit made itself formally known with the nod to his The Grapes of Wrath protagonist with the album The Ghost of Tom Joad. As a songwriter, the Born to Run star has always upheld the notion of working-class dignity. Much like Steinbeck, he doesn’t drag life down the mire to prove a point bellied by the fact that it would be a lie, and rather than glamourise despair, he highlights the beauty that often eclipses it.
In the limited form of song, Springsteen has also always tried to match the scope of Steinbeck’s work. The descriptive nature of his lyricism and unique ability to craft fitting soundscapes can often whisk your imagination off to American freeways, glistening side streets or Terence Malick-like plains. This, too, seems to be inspired by Steinbeck, the king of capturing the American landscape and the importance it plays when it comes to the stories that unfurl therein.
Bob Dylan
“Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.”
“Bob Dylan is the father of my country,” Springsteen writes in his memoir. “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay”.
He pored over the truth in the lyric sheets like literature, appraising the way that he seemed to expose a truth about America. “The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated,” he continues. “He inspired me and gave me hope”.
With that impetus, Springsteen’s view on songwriting would form, and soon he’d finally be signed up after years of his family doubting his prospects, and his label would soon dub him ‘The Next Bob Dylan’.
Philip Roth
“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense.”
American Pastoral resides among Springsteen’s favourite books ever, and alongside Leo Tolstoy, Keith Richards and Dylan, he’d invite Roth to a dream dinner party of writers who have inspired him. As it turns out, the admiration flows both ways, with Roth recently citing: ”How in the midst of all this I came to read and enjoy Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run, I can’t explain other than to say that part of the pleasure of now having so much time at my disposal to read whatever comes my way invites unpremeditated surprises.”
The pair are both from New Jersey and have never been shy of making that known in their work. After all, locality doesn’t exclude people; on the contrary, it makes them feel at home. This is only one of the aspects that have inspired Springsteen. As he said in the early 2000s: “I’ll tell you, those three recent books by Philip Roth just knocked me on my ass. To be in his sixties making work that is so strong, so full of revelations about love and emotional pain, that’s the way to live your artistic life. Sustain, sustain, sustain”. Hopefully, that remains the case for New Jersey’s new senior bard.
Bruce Springsteen’s favourite books:
- American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth
- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
- Chronicles, by Bob Dylan
- Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick
- Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
- Life, by Keith Richards
- Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, by Dennis Overbye
- Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
- Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
- Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, by Greil Marcus
- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Soul Mining: A Musical Life, by Daniel Lanois
- The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
- The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
- The Novels of Jim Thompson
- The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford
- The Stories of Chekhov, by Anton Chekhov
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