4th of July, Asbury Park

A History of the Promised Land

By Daniel Wolff

Wonderfully evocative…a grand, sad story of racism and real estate, political hardball and seaside pleasure-seeking.-A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review

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. Starting with the town's founding as a religious promised land, music journalist and poet Daniel Wolff plots a course through Asbury Park's 130 years of entwined social and musical history, in a story that captures all the allure and heartbreak of the American dream.

"A luminous history of Springsteen's Asbury Park…Wolff creates popular history at its best. Springsteen fans will love it, and so will anyone interested in American social history."-Booklist (starred review)
"It's an ingenious idea, as the author, a poet and an award-winning biographer of Sam Cooke, filters the town's history through more than a century of its all-American summer holiday celebrations."-San Francisco Chronicle
"Unflinching, artful, and indispensable."-Dave Marsh, author of Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s
"Welcome to a town that will soon feel like your own. Daniel Wolff not only writes about Asbury Park, but he embodies the place, its history and its people in a lyrical, detailed, and fascinating way that makes witnesses and neighbors of us all."-Edwidge Danticat, author of The Dew Breaker

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4th of July, Asbury Park

A History of the Promised Land