Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion collected the essays she wrote for The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines in the mid 1960s into a book that named a decade. The title piece follows runaways and acidheads through Haight Ashbury, and other essays investigate John Wayne, the Central Valley, migration, self respect, and the peculiar isolation of Los Angeles. Her prose is precise, cool, and quietly devastating, and she treats her own presence in each story with the same skepticism she brings to her subjects. The book helped define what the New Journalism could do and is still assigned in nearly every serious writing program in the country. It reads as fresh now as it did on publication.
Also by Joan Didion
What you might want to know about Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Joan Didion's landmark essay collection on California, the sixties, and a country coming apart.
Swisher has cited Didion as a formative influence on her podcasts and in interviews, singling out Slouching Towards Bethlehem as required reading for anyone who wants to write about America.
It helps, but Didion gives you enough context inside each piece to make them land even if you were not there.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem was written by Joan Didion, published in 1968 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is 240 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Slouching Towards Bethlehem takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
