Runaway American Dream: Nostalgia, Figurative Memory, and Autofiction in Stories of Born to Run

In this article I propose an argument about not one, but three different renditions of Born to Run. Two of them are books. Just before his hit records Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born in the U.S.A., Born to Run was a milestone in Bruce Springsteen's four-decade career. The album contains songs that despite their loudness offer haunting, depressing explorations of betrayal, isolation, and the despair of post-Vietnam War America. While a great deal of research has approached hometown nostalgia and transformations of blue-collar identity in Springsteen's musical oeuvre, what has yet remained underdeveloped what could the connection be between songs that shaped American cultural memory, Dave Marsh's early Springsteen biography published in 1979, and Springsteen's newly released autobiography—both with the title Born to Run. While the previous piece is clearly calls for a historical approach, the contemporary autobiography by Springsteen raises issues about the spatial nature of social nostalgia, the possibility of intertextuality between different cultural products and the book's relation to the two decades that changed everything.