Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion was born in 1934 and spent the first decade of her life moving frequently (her father was in the Army Air Corps) before settling in Sacramento, California, where her family has deep roots. She is a towering figure of American nonfiction, in addition to having a successful career as a Hollywood script doctor and novelist. She spent most of her career working closely with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, until his death, which is documented in one of her most famous works, 2004’s The Year of Magical Thinking. She is known for the clarity of voice in her work and her keen sense of observation and detail.

Didion was entering her thirties when these pieces began to be published in high profile magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, and she had spent the majority of her twenties in New York working at Vogue before marrying Dunne, who helped her edit her first novel. The two moved to California and adopted a daughter, Quintana, and the period of her life in which she wrote these essays became an enduring image: a quiet, observant woman, open about her anxiety and frequent migraines, who nevertheless drove a yellow Corvette and was becoming a famous figure in the film and journalism scenes. The essays in this collection helped establish her as a preeminent figure of New Journalism, a school that emphasized meaningful truths rather than factual reporting and employed literary modes in their work.

On the page, Didion has a cool, detached style that is often quietly pointing out the ironies in her subject matter. She often provides exhaustive detail about a place or an event, finding connections between these details to provide a larger picture of a system or culture at work. Many of these pieces are rooted in her personal experience, which was unusual for magazine writing at the time. She has growing concern for the decay of American society and focuses on both the outsiders and victims as well as the heroes of American culture. Though she often returns to the past and the effects of history in her writing, she is not idealistic or romantic about it; she’s just as likely to admit that the past she’s conceiving of is a fiction as she is to trace the arc of generations of people who led a community to its current state.

Though she shifts her views later in her career, a center-conservative political and philosophical stance runs through these essays; Didion is no fan of the counterculture or of liberal figures claiming the moral high ground. At the same time, she sees the ways in which American society has failed to deliver the American Dream to her generation, which is exemplified in the way she criticizes Hawaiian oligarchs and American industrialists. She consistently presents a view of American culture that tries to cut through the idealism and image-making to present the facts on the ground, and she uses that as a baseline for drawing new meaning through observation.

This same trend continues throughout her nonfiction career, but she develops a growing suspicion for American systems and ideals as she continues working, which is best typified by her essay that questions the conviction of the Central Park Five and points to a system that vilifies Black men. The roots of that are here in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, as is her devotion to Dunne and Quintana, which are the subjects of her later writing on family, grief, and aging. Slouching Toward Bethlehem marked the arrival of Didion as a generational voice, and she remains one of the most important figures of 20th-century American writing.