Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

First edition
Author Joan Didion
Country United States
Language English
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date
1968
Media type Print (Hardback and paperback)
Pages 238
OCLC 22634186

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming", by W. B. Yeats. The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006).

Title essay

The title essay describes Didion's impressions of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood's heyday as a countercultural center. In contrast to the more utopian image of the milieu promoted by counterculture sympathizers then and now, Didion offered a rather grim portrayal of the goings-on, including an encounter with a pre-school-age child who was given LSD by her parents.

In her preface to the book, Didion writes, "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."[1]

Contents

I. Lifestyles in the Golden Land

II. Personals

III. Seven Places of the Mind

Reception

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist and screenwriter Dan Wakefield wrote, "Didion's first collection of nonfiction writing, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, brings together some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years. Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of 'art,' perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call 'mere journalism,' but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country."[2]

References

  1. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. p. xiii.
  2. Dan Wakefield, "Places, People and Personalities," The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1968.
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