Contents -- "I Got this Guitar and I Learned How to Make It Talk" -- I Born to Run the USA -- 1 Prophets and Profits: Poets, Preachers, and Pragmatists -- 2 Who's the Boss? Springsteen on the Alienation and Salvation of Work and Labor -- 3 They Play Guitars All Night and All Day: On the Ethics of Encores -- 4 Where Were You Born, Bruce Springsteen, and What Does It Matter? -- 5 On the Cover of the Rolling Stone: Revolution in the U.S.A. -- II When We Were Wild and Innocent -- 6 Blinded by the Subterranean Homesick Muse: The Poet as Virtuous and Virtuoso -- 7 Racing in the Street: Freedom, Feminism, and Collateral Damage -- 8 An Everlasting Kiss: The Seduction of Wendy -- III The Dark Edges -- 9 Driving with Springsteen into the Darkness at the Edge of the World -- 10 Thunder Road -- 11 Everything Dies: Facing Fatalism in "Atlantic City" -- 12 Living on the Edge: A Reason to Believe -- 13 Living in "My Hometown": Local Philosophies for Troubled Times -- 14 Bruce Springsteen or Philosophy -- IV Tom Joad's Ghosts -- 15 Straight Time: Images of Oppression -- 16 Whatever You Say, Boss: Or, What the Thunder Road Said -- 17 A Little of that Human Touch: Knowledge and Empathy in the Music of Bruce Springsteen -- 18 Socrates the Sculptor, Springsteen the Singer: Philosophy and Art Against the Tyrants -- 19 Elvis, 57 Channels, and a .44 Magnum: A Cross-Section of Springsteen's Imagination -- V Greetings from . . . -- Proper Names in Springsteen Lyrics -- Hey, That's Me -- Index.