Didion's first essay collection, anatomizing the countercultural unraveling of 1960s California — from Haight-Ashbury hippies and John Wayne to Joan Baez and a squalid Los Angeles murder — alongside personal essays like 'On Keeping a Notebook' and 'Goodbye to All That.'
Books mentioned in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (20)
The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats: “Book epigraph, quoted in full at the front of the book; candidate context captured the line "The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out"”
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill: “a young woman "reading aloud to the supervisors a passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty"”
The Bostonians by Henry James: “a girl who might have interested Henry James, at about the time he did Verena Tarrant, in The Bostonians”
The Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum: “It turns out she is tied up with rehearsals for her junior-high-school play, The Wizard of Oz.”
Community of Fear by Harrison Brown: “listed among the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions' "best-selling pamphlets": "...Donald Michael's Cybernation: The Silent Conquest, and Harrison Brown's Community of Fear"”
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer: “reading list at Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence: "...Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank's Breaking the Thought Barrier..."”
Breaking the Thought Barrier by Jerome Frank: “reading list at Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence: "...Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank's Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience..."”
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: “reading list at Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence: "...Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom..."”
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills: “Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Huxley's Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.”
Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley: “Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Huxley's Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.”
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan: “Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Huxley's Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.”
Sex and the Office by Helen Gurley Brown: “'It's Sex and the Office, honey,' the disc jockey said. 'That's the title. By Helen Gurley Brown.'”
You Are Not the Target by Laura Huxley: “...sipping anise tea and watching Sandy read Laura Huxley's You Are Not the Target.”
The Eighty-Yard Run by Irwin Shaw: “...merely some memory of something once read, probably 'The Eighty-Yard Run.'”
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain: “...a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity...”
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: “...run by a man whose modus operandi most closely resembles that of a character in The Big Sleep.”
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West: “Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires.”
The Hue and Cry About a Change in Tito's Policy and the Undeniable Truth: “"...and Tirana, Albania (The Hue and Cry About a Change in Tito's Policy and the Undeniable Truth), and I tried to hum, from a North Vietnamese song book..." — literature browsed at the Workers' International Bookstore, Watts”
Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler: “...and Harvey Wheeler, the co-author of Fail-Safe.”
The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti: “reading list at Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence: "...Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom..."”