Bruce Springsteen is as prominent a rock star as any musician can be. He has attracted stadiums full of adoring fans, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama (with whom he later hosted a podcast), and has drawn the ire of President Trump for speaking out against a “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” administration that opposes the working-class values that the roots rocker has long espoused.

It wasn’t always this way for the Boss. As difficult as it is to imagine, he struggled to have a career as an artist. As Peter Ames Carlin shows in his terrific book, Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born To Run (Doubleday, August 5), Springsteen’s success was in doubt after his first two albums. In the mid-1970s, he was getting around in a rented station wagon and performing at tiny clubs. An influential review in Boston’s alternative Real Paper—by Jon Landau, who became Springsteen’s producer—helped turn the tide. Within a year, Born to Run sold more than 1 million copies.

Tonight in Jungleland is one of several new books that tell of people who, despite obstacles, pursued their passions and forged creative lives. One is Michael Thomas, author of The Broken King (Grove, August 5). In his memoir, the novelist (Man Gone Down, 2007) describes the torment he lived with after being raped as a child—to say nothing of the racism he’s had to confront. In a starred review, our critic writes, “Thomas believes that one way to keep ‘from falling into darkness’ is to try ‘to make something beautiful.’ This book hits the mark.”

Generations ago, Claude McKay (1890-1948) left Jamaica to attend college in the United States. Afterward, he lived in poverty, not eating for days at a time. He embarked on a writer’s life, venturing to the Soviet Union, Europe, and North Africa, spending “most of his life searching for what ‘home’ meant to him,” says our starred review of Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer (Yale Univ., September 2).

McKay lived in Paris in the 1920s, a city that’s at the heart of Jennifer Dasal’s The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris (Bloomsbury, July 15). “A fresh look at female artists,” says our review, the book “pays homage to the singular space that nurtured them.” Opened in 1893, the Club housed and assisted hundreds of women who faced pressures trying to be artists in the United States.     

The science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) also had challenges in a field dominated by white men. “Nevertheless, she persisted, working at low-wage temp jobs so she would have time for writing,” says our review of Susana M. Morris’ Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad/HarperCollins, August 19). As Morris writes, “she was fueled by her positive obsession to write probing, harrowing tales of humanity’s hubris and hope.” Butler’s determination paid off. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, her middle school now bears her name, and her tributes extend beyond this world: In 2021 NASA named a landing site on Mars in her honor.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.