Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion · 1968
Didion's first collection is arguably her best: the Haight-Ashbury essay, the John Wayne essay, "On Self-Respect," "On Keeping a Notebook." She invented a new mode. Personal journalism that diagnosed the culture through the writer's neurosis.
The case against
Didion goes to the Haight already knowing what she will find, and finds it; the hippies are specimens who never get to talk back. Her cool is a pose, since imitated into a national affliction. And the famous five-year-old on acid lands as a kicker precisely because she declines to do anything but watch.
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