Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time.”—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review. Here in digital format for the first time is Joan Didion’s landmark collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, work that helped define the New Journalism of the late 1960s and today stands as some of the very finest nonfiction writing ever produced by an American writer. Reflective and brilliantly observational, powered by a brave, unblinking vision that sweeps America’s cultural landscape during the Vietnam era, Didion vividly documents the acid-tripping counterculture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the book’s title essay, and elsewhere writes of billionaire Howard Hughes and folk-singer Joan Baez, of John Wayne and Alcatraz Island, of a California murderess and a Las Vegas wedding. She writes of her own Sacramento girlhood, of life in Death Valley; she profiles an L.A. Maoist; she captures the ominous mood in the Golden Land, in southern California, when the dry, hot Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert during autumn. She writes of her eight years in New York City as a young woman, and her departure for L.A., in the revered personal essay “Goodbye to All That.” A master stylist whose precise, lucid prose, elegantly layered with penetrating reflection and detail, has influenced generations of writers, Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem gives us a book that had she not gone on to write anything else, would still be celebrated today as an essential portrait of America in the 1960s. And now readers of digital books, whether fans of Joan Didion or those curious to discover this remarkable writer, can download her pioneering collection for the first time.