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Joan Didion, born 1934
Joan Didion's work encapsulates the anxieties of modern life in an instantly recognizable style. She published her first novel in 1963, but it was her collection of nonfiction essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) that brought her widespread public and critical attention. The title of the book, from William Butler Yeats's (1865–1939) poem "The Second Coming," denotes the Irish poet's tone of weary fatalism about contemporary society.
A New York Times book review stated, "The title piece is about Haight-Ashbury [in San Francisco], and conveys the complexity and the ‘atomization' of the hippie scene not as the latest fashionable trend, but as a serious advanced stage of society in which things are truly ‘falling apart' as in Yeats's poem." Didion, however, was not immune to the pleasures of California life; she posed here with her Corvette Stingray, an allusion to her writing about the joys of fast driving.
Julian Wasser, 1970 |