Born To Run: The story behind the Boss in Springsteen's own words

THE Bruce Springsteen who emerges from the pages of Born To Run, the singer’s hugely anticipated new memoir, is an enigmatic everyman. 

Across the past 40 years, the world has formed a clear view of Springsteen as a blue-collar laureate, his songs infused with the grime and romance of the All-American small town.

However, Born To Run suggests that, actually, we don’t know Springsteen at all. Far from the straight-forward jeans-and-white-tee rocker the book reveals him to be deeply complex and contradictory — an artist whose career was driven at least in part by the desire to escape family demons that, in the end, caught up with him anyway.