Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

by Warren Zanes

O’Connor’s stories didn’t hinge on redemption. Among her most lasting images is that of the traveling salesman’s Bible in the story “Good Country People,” a book hollowed out and containing a bottle of booze, some condoms, and a deck of cards with naked women on them. Just when you think it’s one thing, the Good Book, it becomes another. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” comes into her moment of grace, a word O’Connor liked, only as the killer on the loose, the Misfit, holds a gun in her face. In that instant, late in the story, she sees his humanity as it’s bound up with her own…and then she’s dead. “ ‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ ” In Flannery O’Connor’s words, she was after those moments when she could reveal “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”