Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.

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.

CONTENTS:

I. Life Styles in the Golden Land

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream

John Wayne: A Love Song

Where the Kissing Never Stops

Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)

7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38

California Dreaming

Marrying Absurd

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

II. Personals

On Keeping a Notebook

On Self-Respect

I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind

On Morality

On Going Home

III. Seven Places of the Mind

Notes from a Native Daughter

Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W

Rock of Ages

The Seacoast of Despair

Guaymas, Sonora

Los Angeles Notebook