I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing

'I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing.' So said Bruce Springsteen when interviewed about his tastes in literature. I found this interview via 'The Imaginative Conservative'.

Springsteen spoke about the way that Flannery O’Connor, James M. Cain, John Cheever, Sherwood Anderson and Jim Thompson contributed greatly to the turn his music took around 1978-82:

'They brought out a sense of geography and the dark strain in my writing, broadened my horizons about what might be accomplished with a pop song and are still the cornerstone literally for what I try to accomplish today ... the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.'

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Bruce Springsteen - Reason To Believe.