This book dives deeply into the music, career, and activism of Jackson Browne within the context of American life and the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Known for albums like Late for the Sky , The Pretender , and Running on Empty , Jackson Browne was a master of capturing the counterculture ethos of the 1960s. Traversing his career over half a century, Cornel Bonca dives deeply into Browne's music and activism-including environmentalism-within the context of American life, revealing a figure still fueled by American ideals like justice, freedom, and equality for all. Growing up in Southern California in the early 1960s, Browne was greatly influenced by his mother's progressive politics, the music of Bob Dylan and the speeches of Martin Luther King. Later drawn to the Laurel Canyon rock scene, he moved to Los Angeles and established himself as a songwriter for The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and many others, becoming a fixture of the singer-songwriter movement in the early 1970s. His music in the 1980s was largely political in scope, critiquing America's conservative turn, its militarism in Central America, its nuclear brinksmanship with the Soviet Union, and its dismantling of Great Society social programs. He later returned to the personal music his fans treasured in 1993 with I'm Alive . Browne's music has since toggled back and forth between the personal and the political, while he himself has remained astonishingly active in local and national politics. This book offers a deep exploration of his music, life, and political activism in the changing face of America over the last fifty years, and why he still matters today. “Cornel Bonca offers thoughtful insight into the life of the genius singer, songwriter, musician, and entertainer that is Jackson Browne while never forgetting it's all about the music. I highly recommend it.” ―Dicky Barrett, frontman and songwriter for The Mighty Mighty BossTones and The Defiant “A lyrical, fiercely intelligent book which places Jackson Browne in his proper context. Like all talented writers who venture to write about music, Bonca is unafraid to explore what the music did to him, personally-how it morphed his point of view and introduced him to a faraway world. Through Bonca's ferocious intellect and elegant prose, we see the brilliance of one of the great songwriters of the twentieth century, the fractured America which gave him voice and-most of all-a glimpse of ourselves as we marvel at the beauty wrought from its failures.” ―Mikel Jollett, frontman and songwriter, The Airborne Toxic Event; author, Hollywood Park: A Memoir “In lively, accessible prose, Cornel Bonca explores Jackson Browne's fifty-year career, persuasively demonstrating that Browne's music and political commitments had their roots in the liberal humanism of the California counterculture of the 1960s. In a far-reaching work that is equally about Browne, the author's own fifty-year engagement with Browne's music, and, perhaps more than anything, about the slow-fading reverberations of the 1960s, Bonca depicts Browne and his music as cultivated by a sincere commitment to the universal human values.” ―Stephen Mexal, author of The Conservative Aesthetic and Reading for Liberalism “ The Permanent Holdout is … a thoughtful exploration of how one artist came to shape another person's life. [Cornel] Bonca is the proxy for the rest of us, and as a guide to Browne's music, he is a fine one as we go through the singer's creative ups and downs. Fans of Jackson Browne should enjoy this one-man excavation of his work.” ― Booklist Reviews Cornel Bonca is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton, where he teaches courses in American literature, critical theory, and rock 'n' roll history. His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in two dozen publications, among them Salon, The New York Observer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacaranda , and Modern Language Studies , where he's written on the beat poets, Bruce Springsteen, The National, The Airborne Toxic Event, David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo. His last book was Paul Simon: An American Tune . He lives in Altadena, CA with his wife and daughter.