Back in 2014, Bruce Springsteen was interviewed by The New York Times focusing on the literature which had inspired him, in his music as well as his life.
As you might expect, there was no shortage of American cannon amongst his selections, and memoirs penned by Keith Richards and Bob Dylan also made the list. Yet amongst his literary preferences, there were some surprises.
From musical American cannon to the fundamentals of 20th century literature, Bruce Springsteen’s favourite reading material is a collection you’ll really want to dig into.
Admittedly, it would be nonsense to pigeonhole Springsteen’s sphere of influence to America alone. Russian literature creeps into the list more than once, and Spain’s seaboard storyteller Gabriel García Márquez makes the cut with his eminent tragedy Love in the Time of Cholera.
See the full list below:
- 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
Via New York Times/Open Culture.
