Influences …

… Of Songs and Stories: What Bruce Springsteen Learned From Flannery O’Connor. (Hat tip, Zoe Colvin/Higgie.)

How could a believer such as O’Connor see the world as she portrayed it in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”? “To the hard of hearing you shout,” O’Connor explained, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Grotesques, really. “The characters are not ‘likeable,’” Joseph O’Neil writes in 

The Atlantic, “but my God they are alive.” The very same thing could be said of characters one finds in Nebraska.