Celebrated iconic and indispensable Joan Didion's first work of nonfiction Slouching
Towards Bethlehem is considered a watershed moment in American writing. First published in
1968 the collection was critically praised as one of the best prose written in this country.
More than perhaps any other book this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists
of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion's focus exploring subjects such
as John Wayne and Howard Hughes growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a
Death Valley motel room and especially the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury the
heart of the counterculture. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: [Didion] has been an articulate
witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time a memorable voice partly
eulogistic partly despairing always in control.
