I grew up near him and thought I knew what it would be, but a historian says a lot of us miss the point — Fifty years ago, Bruce Springsteen released his first album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.,” named for the beach town 20 minutes up the Garden State Parkway from my family’s summer house in the Pine Barrens. Every June, on the way to our place, we’d pass the Jersey Freeze stand in…

Hint: It’s a far cry from James Patterson’s $80+ million — In the last year of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned an unlucky $13.13 in royalties for his books. He wasn’t the only great author who died broke. Herman Melville couldn’t get an advance for Moby-Dick because, his publisher said, he hadn’t earned back the money he’d received for his…

It works for big-name authors with large followings, but what if you’re a small-name or no-name author? — “You have to be on social media.” If you’ve written a book — or plan to do one — you’ve probably heard this more than once. Editors, agents, and publicists hail social media as the potential savior of authors ignored by mainstream reviewers and news outlets. As evidence, they point…

Who was the most influential gay author in U.S. history? You might think first of Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, or Langston Hughes. But you could also make a strong case for Maurice Sendak, whose Where the Wild Things Are forever changed children’s literature with its radically new way of telling…

‘Never marry’ and other secrets to a world-class writer’s success — Philip Roth isn’t quite the Tom Brady of American fiction. Even his most ardent fans don’t call him the greatest of all time, not with literary forebears like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. But you could argue that no novelist of the past three-quarters of a century stayed at the…

Ronan Farrow shows why we needed the #MeToo movement in a book based on Pulitzer-winning stories — Harvey Weinstein was Hollywood’s apex predator, the man at the top of a food chain that sparked the #MeToo movement. He ate young women alive, figuratively speaking: actresses, employees, and others unlucky enough to cross his path during his long career as a producer and studio head. All of it…

It’s hurricane relief in a box if a storm knocks out your power — Hurricane season starts on June 1, and that’s bad news if you see yourself as wired to your devices “from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally,” as Jane Austen wrote in another context. I’ve lived through two epic storms in the past decade or so —…

Why it’s not an unabashed celebration of patriotism — Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” may be the most misunderstood song in American rock. Casual listeners often take it for an unabashed celebration of patriotism, ideal background music for a barbecue on a national holiday like Memorial Day. …

The best book I’ve read on nurses tells the true story of 77 heroic women who became POWs in World War II — America’s best-known Army nurse might be the fictional Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the movie and TV series “M*A*S*H.” That’s a shame, because the nation has had plenty of heroic real-life military nurses. They include the 77 remarkable women whose stories the historian Elizabeth Norman tells in We Band…