Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Didion's revelatory memoir The Year of Magical Thinking was adapted as a one-woman stage show starring Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway. Her books include The White Album, Play It As It Lays, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

After earning a Bachelor's degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley, she started her literary career writing articles and essays for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and National Review, establishing herself as a prominent member of the New Journalism movement. Joan Didion (1934-2021) was the National Book Award-winning author of many works of fiction and nonfiction. A rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.' - Dan Wakefield, The New York Times Book Review 'In her portraits of people, Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naive acid-trippers, left wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked: ' 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.' 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. Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didion's first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American writing.

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