Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion(1968)
The centre of the Golden State was not holding. Joan Didion published this essay collection in 1968, and its title piece, a report from Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, remains one of the most devastating works of American journalism, a meticulous accounting of runaways, acid casualties, and children on LSD that never raises its voice above a cool precision. Didion's sentences are tuned like piano wire, taut and capable of drawing blood. Whether writing about John Wayne, Californian water rights, or her own migraines, she practises a style in which what is left unsaid exerts more pressure than what appears on the page. The collection maps a country losing its narrative and a writer finding hers.
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Capote pioneered the literary journalism Didion perfects, but focused on a single crime where Didion sees an entire culture unravelling.
Yeats wrote the poem Didion took her title from, and his rough beast slouches through every essay in the collection.
Sontag matches Didion's intellectual ambition and cultural range, but from the library instead of the highway.