Still, just because Eliot felt bad most of the time doesn’t mean he didn’t get it exactly right about water, rock and the Unreal City. Likewise it was possible to imagine Didion bee-stung by blue meanies even at Walden Pond. Eliot, Randall Jarrell once said that he’d have written The Waste Land about the Garden of Eden.

But always anterior to the shiverings and effacements, the staccatos and crescendos in an echo chamber of blank uneasiness, there was a pessimism she appeared to have been born to, a hard-wired chill. She seemed sometimes so sensitive that whole decades hurt her feelings, and the prose on the page suggested Valéry’s “shiverings of an effaced leaf,” as if her next trick might be evaporation. Then as the essays and novels and screenplays proliferated, she turned into a desert lioness of the style pages, part sybilline icon and part Stanford seismograph, alert on the faultlines of the culture to every tremor of tectonic fashion plate. “My only advantage as a reporter,” Joan Didion explained in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” For awhile there back in the bliss of acid and guitars, she was practically counterrevolutionary, a poster girl for anomie, wearing a bikini but also a migraine to the bon- fires of the zeitgeist. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case.

Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury.

Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 19 have been brought together into one thrilling collection. Joan Didion’s incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem The White Album Salvador Miami After Henry Political Fictions and Where I Was From. Read the works discussed in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.

Joan didion everyman's library