Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"A half-century after its initial publication in 1968, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains the essential portrait of America--and California in particular--during the sixties. The remarkable debut essay collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, it explores such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes; growing up in California; the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room; and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. As Dan Wakefield wrote in The New York Times Book Review, 'In her portraits of people, [Didion] is not out to expose but to understand...[She] makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful'"--Back cover.