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The 1960s & 70s: Run, River / Slouching Towards Bethlehem / Play It As It Lays / A Book of Common Prayer / The White Album
Cool, dispassionate, and incisive, Joan Didion’s voice is electric on the page. Using autobiographical elements to stunning literary effect, she has captured the anarchic convulsions and anxious contradictions of the waning American Century and the coming new millennium with incomparable clarity and force. Now, Library of America inaugurates a definitive three-volume edition of Didion’s collected writings with the landmark works of the 1960s and 1970s, books that established her as one of the most original and influential literary figures of our time.
Didion’s darkly nostalgic debut novel Run River (1963) is set among the ranch families of her native Sacramento Valley, their prosperity and pioneer traditions threatened by suburban sprawl and the changing values of a postwar world. A riveting chronicle of passion, infidelity, and betrayal in the twenty-year marriage of Lily Knight and Everett McClellan, it eloquently evokes one woman’s alienation amid the landscapes of a disappearing California.
A major milestone in the rise of the New Journalism, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) gathers Didion’s kaleidoscopic essays of the mid-1960s: masterpieces whose subjects include an aging John Wayne, a Los Angeles Maoist, the Las Vegas wedding industry, and the acid-tripping counterculture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The collection showcases Didion’s signature literary persona—“a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing, always in control” (Joyce Carol Oates)—while introducing a style of reportage that transformed the expectations of generations of readers and writers.
In Play It As It Lays (1970) model and actress Maria Wyeth, her brief career fading, finds herself adrift in a sun-drenched, air-conditioned, and utterly benumbed world in which pills, fast cars, and casual sex have replaced human connection. The pared-down, impressionistic prose frames a harrowing story of a Hollywood life gone wrong.
Well-meaning norteamericana Charlotte Douglas arrives in the lush, dangerously chaotic Central American republic of Boca Grande, in Didion’s third novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977), hoping to trace the whereabouts of her daughter Marin, an affluent teenager turned Marxist-revolutionary terrorist. “Immaculate of history, innocent of politics,” Douglas is swept up in intrigues and violence beyond her ability to comprehend, as Didion dissects the menacing realities of imperialism and revolution.
In The White Album (1979) Didion continues her intense, intimate, clear-eyed investigations of a California coming apart at the seams. In trips to shopping malls and to the Getty Museum; visits with Nancy Reagan, The Doors, and the Black Panthers; accounts of the prosecution of the Manson Family—all counterpointed with her own dark moods and obsessions—she offers a brilliant mosaic of a time that continues to shape our own and a monument of superlative literary nonfiction.
Didion’s darkly nostalgic debut novel Run River (1963) is set among the ranch families of her native Sacramento Valley, their prosperity and pioneer traditions threatened by suburban sprawl and the changing values of a postwar world. A riveting chronicle of passion, infidelity, and betrayal in the twenty-year marriage of Lily Knight and Everett McClellan, it eloquently evokes one woman’s alienation amid the landscapes of a disappearing California.
A major milestone in the rise of the New Journalism, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) gathers Didion’s kaleidoscopic essays of the mid-1960s: masterpieces whose subjects include an aging John Wayne, a Los Angeles Maoist, the Las Vegas wedding industry, and the acid-tripping counterculture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. The collection showcases Didion’s signature literary persona—“a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing, always in control” (Joyce Carol Oates)—while introducing a style of reportage that transformed the expectations of generations of readers and writers.
In Play It As It Lays (1970) model and actress Maria Wyeth, her brief career fading, finds herself adrift in a sun-drenched, air-conditioned, and utterly benumbed world in which pills, fast cars, and casual sex have replaced human connection. The pared-down, impressionistic prose frames a harrowing story of a Hollywood life gone wrong.
Well-meaning norteamericana Charlotte Douglas arrives in the lush, dangerously chaotic Central American republic of Boca Grande, in Didion’s third novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977), hoping to trace the whereabouts of her daughter Marin, an affluent teenager turned Marxist-revolutionary terrorist. “Immaculate of history, innocent of politics,” Douglas is swept up in intrigues and violence beyond her ability to comprehend, as Didion dissects the menacing realities of imperialism and revolution.
In The White Album (1979) Didion continues her intense, intimate, clear-eyed investigations of a California coming apart at the seams. In trips to shopping malls and to the Getty Museum; visits with Nancy Reagan, The Doors, and the Black Panthers; accounts of the prosecution of the Manson Family—all counterpointed with her own dark moods and obsessions—she offers a brilliant mosaic of a time that continues to shape our own and a monument of superlative literary nonfiction.
980 pages, Hardcover
Published November 12, 2019
36 people are currently reading
438 people want to read
About the author
Joan Didion
102 books17.1k followersJoan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 1, 2025
Having read 900+ pages of Joan Didion I am not sure what to say. Which seems rather lame but in my defense it is a lot to take in over an extended period of time. Add to this my lack of much knowledge as to the author and her early career and it is hard to wrap my head around an offer any particular insights. I really enjoyed Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album. Her style and voice are so unique and the time the essays were written makes it seem like time travel.
Of the novels, I liked Run, River better than Play It As It Lays and found A Book of Common Prayer rather tragic and baffling. I am glad I read this volume but might give it a minute before I dive into 1980's & 90's.
I also should note that reading the Library of America books is such a joy. So well and beautifully made that there is a pleasure in just holding them. I have a few dozen more on my shelf so there is a lot to look forward to... :-)
Of the novels, I liked Run, River better than Play It As It Lays and found A Book of Common Prayer rather tragic and baffling. I am glad I read this volume but might give it a minute before I dive into 1980's & 90's.
I also should note that reading the Library of America books is such a joy. So well and beautifully made that there is a pleasure in just holding them. I have a few dozen more on my shelf so there is a lot to look forward to... :-)
July 1, 2025
Ranking for each book :
Run River : 2⭐️
Slouching towards Bethlehem: 5 ⭐️(Favorite in the collection)
Play it as it lays : 5 ⭐️
The Book of Common Prayer : 2⭐️
The White Album: 5 ⭐️
Run River : 2⭐️
Slouching towards Bethlehem: 5 ⭐️(Favorite in the collection)
Play it as it lays : 5 ⭐️
The Book of Common Prayer : 2⭐️
The White Album: 5 ⭐️
November 12, 2019
Joan of Arc didn't write about change,
she loped off heads in battle - that's female empowerment.
cc:
Susan B. Anthony
Betty Friedan
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Helen Gurley Brown
Gloria Steinem
Joan Didion
and
Alice Walker
#poem
Chris Roberts, God in Very Many Increments
she loped off heads in battle - that's female empowerment.
cc:
Susan B. Anthony
Betty Friedan
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Helen Gurley Brown
Gloria Steinem
Joan Didion
and
Alice Walker
#poem
Chris Roberts, God in Very Many Increments
July 22, 2021
Didion's fiction and non-fiction are both well written with a clear voice. Her two non-fiction works in this volume, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, are excellent collections of essays with great insight into California and the United States in the 60's and 70's.
The three novels were painful to read. Run River is a story of empty wealth and empty lives among a disappearing landed gentry of California. Play It As It Lays is a story of a 1960's Hollywood hellscape told through the eyes of Maria Wyeth, a minor actress and wife of rising director Carter Lang. Maria is tortured by empty relationships, an institutionalized 4 year old daughter and an abortion that is a turning point in the book. A Book of Common Prayer revolves around a powerful family in the fictional Latin American country of Boca Grande. Told through the eyes of an American Boca Grande Plantation Heiress who serves as a third party narrator for the novel. The book revolves around the lives of 3 wealthy American leftists and questions their motives and motivations.
I did not find one character in these novels that drove empathy, or sympathy. All three books lay out bleak environments of characters who are incredibly self-centered and self-driven.
Library of America has issued two volumes of Didion's work that are arranged chronologically. Vol. 1 60's and 80's, Vol. 2 80's and 90's. I'm apprehensive on taking on additional novels but am interested in reading more essays. If L of A had split the set into non-fiction and fiction I would have welcomed a full volume of Didion non-fiction.
The three novels were painful to read. Run River is a story of empty wealth and empty lives among a disappearing landed gentry of California. Play It As It Lays is a story of a 1960's Hollywood hellscape told through the eyes of Maria Wyeth, a minor actress and wife of rising director Carter Lang. Maria is tortured by empty relationships, an institutionalized 4 year old daughter and an abortion that is a turning point in the book. A Book of Common Prayer revolves around a powerful family in the fictional Latin American country of Boca Grande. Told through the eyes of an American Boca Grande Plantation Heiress who serves as a third party narrator for the novel. The book revolves around the lives of 3 wealthy American leftists and questions their motives and motivations.
I did not find one character in these novels that drove empathy, or sympathy. All three books lay out bleak environments of characters who are incredibly self-centered and self-driven.
Library of America has issued two volumes of Didion's work that are arranged chronologically. Vol. 1 60's and 80's, Vol. 2 80's and 90's. I'm apprehensive on taking on additional novels but am interested in reading more essays. If L of A had split the set into non-fiction and fiction I would have welcomed a full volume of Didion non-fiction.
February 3, 2022
(I read the first 4 books in this compilation in summer of 2021, and read The White Album after Joan Didion's death in January of 2022.)
If you were growing up in the 1970s, babysitting the kids of young moms in their 20s and 30s, you saw these books everywhere. They were on bedside tables and in those little magazine holders people used to keep in bathrooms and tucked onto neat little bookshelves next to Jonathan Livingston Seagull and fad-diet books and Fear Of Flying. If you lived in New Jersey, they and their author represented something exotic for young moms to aspire to -- the upwardly mobile California lifestyle. Didion, very early on, assumed a gravitas and authority that established her as someone who could tell you what to think about all manner of issues from feminism to the hippie counterculture to Howard Hughes. She wrote some novels too.
So how does her 60s/70s bibliography hold up? Run, River is big western melodrama in a Douglas Sirk style and you can feel Didion getting her feet under herself, developing her clipped, cutting syntax and minimalist, unsentimental manner of description. Slouching Towards Bethlehem collects all of the early journalism that made her famous. California was a still a novel concept at the time for most Americans and Didion was perfectly placed to observe and report it all. The title essay in Slouching serves as the last word on the '60s for many people, while "Goodbye To All That" is the ultimate farewell to youth, particularly if you came of age working in Manhattan.
I had read Play It As It Lays a couple of years before and my review of that one consisted of three words: Brief, brilliant, brutal. It's still the definitive depiction of Hollywood anomie. A Book Of Common Prayer, located in a Central American banana republic on the eve of revolution, has a Graham Greene feel but still packs a punch, though it suffers from the author's stylistic tic of repeating the same phrases in several consecutive sentences.
The White Album starts out strong with the title essay, scathing commentary on the events of the demise of the California Dream, much like "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," but Didion is no longer in a unique place. She's a celebrity now and her world is narrower and less interesting. She complains about the Reagans' taste in furnishings (Many Mansions), about the Getty Museum (The Getty) and about bureaucrats (Bureaucrats). She dislikes the women's movement. She writes about places she's been to lately. In "On The Mall," she rounds up some fun facts about shopping malls. This is how it is for all pundits. They start out white hot, then climb onto the opinion treadmill and tread until they run out of things to say.
I have heard that Didion found her footing again with The Year Of Magical Thinking. It's good to have a story to tell. As for this collection, if you're interested in this go-go '60s, Jet Age era literature, you're better off picking up two thin paperbacks on eBay (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays).
If you were growing up in the 1970s, babysitting the kids of young moms in their 20s and 30s, you saw these books everywhere. They were on bedside tables and in those little magazine holders people used to keep in bathrooms and tucked onto neat little bookshelves next to Jonathan Livingston Seagull and fad-diet books and Fear Of Flying. If you lived in New Jersey, they and their author represented something exotic for young moms to aspire to -- the upwardly mobile California lifestyle. Didion, very early on, assumed a gravitas and authority that established her as someone who could tell you what to think about all manner of issues from feminism to the hippie counterculture to Howard Hughes. She wrote some novels too.
So how does her 60s/70s bibliography hold up? Run, River is big western melodrama in a Douglas Sirk style and you can feel Didion getting her feet under herself, developing her clipped, cutting syntax and minimalist, unsentimental manner of description. Slouching Towards Bethlehem collects all of the early journalism that made her famous. California was a still a novel concept at the time for most Americans and Didion was perfectly placed to observe and report it all. The title essay in Slouching serves as the last word on the '60s for many people, while "Goodbye To All That" is the ultimate farewell to youth, particularly if you came of age working in Manhattan.
I had read Play It As It Lays a couple of years before and my review of that one consisted of three words: Brief, brilliant, brutal. It's still the definitive depiction of Hollywood anomie. A Book Of Common Prayer, located in a Central American banana republic on the eve of revolution, has a Graham Greene feel but still packs a punch, though it suffers from the author's stylistic tic of repeating the same phrases in several consecutive sentences.
The White Album starts out strong with the title essay, scathing commentary on the events of the demise of the California Dream, much like "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," but Didion is no longer in a unique place. She's a celebrity now and her world is narrower and less interesting. She complains about the Reagans' taste in furnishings (Many Mansions), about the Getty Museum (The Getty) and about bureaucrats (Bureaucrats). She dislikes the women's movement. She writes about places she's been to lately. In "On The Mall," she rounds up some fun facts about shopping malls. This is how it is for all pundits. They start out white hot, then climb onto the opinion treadmill and tread until they run out of things to say.
I have heard that Didion found her footing again with The Year Of Magical Thinking. It's good to have a story to tell. As for this collection, if you're interested in this go-go '60s, Jet Age era literature, you're better off picking up two thin paperbacks on eBay (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays).
December 3, 2021
I come to Joan Didion by way of the lyric essay. Not that she called her writing lyric or even an essay. In the beginning, Didion was a reporter who chafed at the restrictions imposed in the 1950s. Journalists were supposed to be objective. They dealt exclusively in facts. If there was no other way around it, a journalist might refer to herself as “this reporter.”
Didion broke with all that in the articles collected in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. She put herself on the film set with John Wayne. Wrote of her childhood in Sacramento. Drove the Harbor Freeway during the Watts Riots while LA burned “as we had always known it would.”
Didion dared to use the word “I” when interviewing. Michael Laski is the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A. (Marxist-Leninist).
To read the full review, please visit my website for In the Golden Land.
Didion broke with all that in the articles collected in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. She put herself on the film set with John Wayne. Wrote of her childhood in Sacramento. Drove the Harbor Freeway during the Watts Riots while LA burned “as we had always known it would.”
Didion dared to use the word “I” when interviewing. Michael Laski is the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A. (Marxist-Leninist).
As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
To read the full review, please visit my website for In the Golden Land.
April 19, 2020
Didion’s third, powerful novel, about an urban mother who ends up in small, third-world Central American country seeking her 18-year-old daughter, part of terrorist group. To Charlotte, her daughter is still Marin, the pretty girl in the flowered dress in Tivoli Gardens, not a suspect wanted by the FBI. Charlotte is innocent of history, of reality, of wants or desires, with mindless travel, loss (the daughter, two husbands, a premature baby), lack of political savvy. The “atomization of society” is the 1960s-1970s is backdrop for Didion’s writings. Her characters are spare, without visible drama, unable or unwilling to see or understand the consequences of their actions or inactions. Unique writing style, short sentences, minimal description of background information, we are drawn into her characters, wanting to know more about them, to discover empathy for them, to shake them up
August 10, 2023
Few if any writers captured the dark side of American life in the 1960's and 70's (the decades during which I came of age) as brilliantly as Joan Didion. I'd read some of her stuff a long time ago but reading so much it back to back in this beautifully produced Library of America edition gives it a kind of cumulative punch that none of the books on their own quite delivered and leaves a lasting impression/bruise. Her favorite band of the 1960's was the Doors. Need I say more?
April 19, 2025
Read the first three stories, pretty racy but not unrealistic for the 1960s. Racy so was in vogue in the 60s and 70s reading about affairs and daliances outside of matrimony. Characters were not likeable so wasn't an enjoyable read. Ran out of time and it had to be returned to the library.
Read
February 28, 2020Fiction D556a 2019
May 16, 2020
I so love Joan Didion
July 4, 2021
Read Run River
Want to read
December 12, 2024I did not mean to mark this and idk how to take it off
February 4, 2025
(only read the white album)
the way joan talks about LA/california is the way i talk about lima and that makes me want to kill myselffff
best parts #tome:
joan’s packing list, like an inside joke with friend.
“but that is not our house anymore,” hit me like a truck. like it literally is not our house anymore...
and that opener... we tell ourselves stories to live... (two dumbass bitches telling each other EXACTLYYY)
much to think about
the way joan talks about LA/california is the way i talk about lima and that makes me want to kill myselffff
best parts #tome:
joan’s packing list, like an inside joke with friend.
“but that is not our house anymore,” hit me like a truck. like it literally is not our house anymore...
and that opener... we tell ourselves stories to live... (two dumbass bitches telling each other EXACTLYYY)
much to think about
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews