New Jersey has spawned countless poets, authors and songwriters, from Crane to Ginsberg to Williams to Roth to Perrotta to Diaz to Basie to Springsteen. From the Garden State's highways that "knot like a bowl of asphalt-sauced spaghetti" to its famed bastions of academia, gritty rust belt urban centers, beaches, swamps and mountains, New Jersey is America compressed into less than 9,000 square miles. Add the pressure of being squeezed between New York City and Philadelphia and you can forge the words, humor and song that come from what should be known as The Underdog State. The Secret History...