The story of the boardwalk town Bruce Springsteen made famous-and a quintessential portrait of small-town American democracy.

When Bruce Springsteen called his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, he introduced a generation of fans to a fallen seaside resort town that came to represent working-class American life. But behind this archetypal small-town landscape lies a complicated past.
Starting with the town's founding as a religious promised land, music journalist and poet Daniel Wolff plots a course through 130 years of entwined social and musical history, touching on John Philip Sousa, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, and Frankie Lymon on the way to the town Bruce was born to run from. Out of the details of local history-the boardwalk in the Gilded Age; the celebrities who passed through, from Stephen Crane to Martin Luther King; sensational murder trials; the birth of Mob control; and a devastating mid-century "race riot"-emerges a universal story of one small town's fortunes. Told with grace and full of fascinating detail, Daniel Wolff's tour across thirteen decades of the 4th of July in Asbury Park captures all the allure and heartbreak of the American dream reduced to blight and decay, with gentrification as the one hope for a return to its glory days.
Daniel Wolff is the author of You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Award for best music book of 1995, and he was nominated for a Grammy for his liner notes for a recent Sam Cooke box set. His journalism has appeared in Vogue, the Nation, and Doubletake, and his poetry in the Paris Review, the Partisan Review, and the Threepenny Review.
"4th Of July, Asbury Park is an exhilarating, illuminating peek behind the curtain of one delirious piece of ocean-side property. The rise and fall and fall again of Asbury Park functions as a heartbreakingly lucid metaphor for how American society is built upon visionary dreams, but is tragically subject to greed, corruption, racism, and elitism. Gossipy, juicy with amazing characters, rich