-- In hardscrabble 1960s Phillipsburg, with his blue-collar parents working hard to support three children, David Hajdu learned to dream.
And to write.
In elementary school, he also discovered popular music and, in the process, sowed the seeds for his extraordinary career documenting pop culture in newspapers, magazines and books.
Hajdu, 55, a professor at Columbia University School of Journalism and music critic for The New Republic magazine, on Thursday will learn whether he'll win the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for his book, ''Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics and Culture.''
He already has made history: Officials say he's the first author to be nominated three times for his first four books. He was nominated in 1996 for his first book, ''Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn,'' and in 2002 for ''Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.''
The nonprofit organization of 600 book reviewers will give awards to writers in six categories ''to promote the finest books and reviews.'' They have honored such writers as John Updike, Gore Vidal and Anne Tyler.
''I'm in really great, great company,'' said Hajdu (pronounced Hay-doo). ''I'm really very fortunate to write in a very serious way about subjects that I love very, very much,'' he said.
Hajdu's life in New York reflects his life's passions.
At the apartment he shares with his wife, accomplished jazz-pop singer Karen Oberlin, and their son, Nate, 6, a corner of one room is taken up by a juke box stocked with 45 rpm records -- most of which he bought in Phillipsburg. A wall in another room is covered by shelves of CDs.
And there are shelves of books, including one signed by his favorite author, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett.
His office at Columbia also is crammed with books, mostly on music as diverse as Gershwin, the Beatles, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. His book shelf is so stacked, a ladder is needed to reach the top.
Hajdu is so passionate about writing, says graduate student Abigail Drachman-Jones of Newton, Mass., who chose Hajdu to advise her thesis, ''he speaks in paragraphs. It's how he lives his life. His passion for what he does is tangible.''
Hajdu often returns to Phillipsburg, where his parents, Charles and Angie, remain in an apartment not far from the home where he, his brother and sister were raised.
