Product details
- ISBN 9780007204380
- Weight: 394g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 17 May 2005
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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This comprehensive edition brings together for the first time three seminal collections by legendary essayist and journalist Joan Didion: Slouching toward Bethlehem, White Album and Sentimental Journeys. Prefaced with a new introduction by Joan Didion.
Live and Learn comprises three of the personal essay collections that established Joan Didion as a major figure in the modern canon – arranged in chronological order so that readers can appreciate not only the qualities of the essays per se, but also their evolution over time. It also includes a new introduction by Joan Didion herself.
The stylistic masterpiece Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) has become a modern classic, capturing the mood of 1960s America and especially the center of its counterculture, California. The cornerstone essay, an extraordinary report on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, sets the agenda for the rest of this book – depicting and America where, in some way or another, things are falling apart and “the center cannot hold”. The White Album (1979) is a syncopated, swirling mosaic of the 60s and 70s, covering people and artifacts from the Black Panthers and the Manson family to John Paul Getty’s museum. Sentimental Journeys (1992) shifts its perspective slightly to take in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong, the Reagan campaign trail, and the inequities of Los Angeles real estate.
An important collection, Live and Learn is the perfect one-stop primer on Joan Didion, and an essential reference for readers old and new. It confirms the power of this uniquely unbiased, moving writer, and showcases her artful yet simple prose.
Joan Didion was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California and lives in New York City.
She is the author of five novels and seven books of non-fiction. Her collections of essays made her a famous observer of American politics and culture. Her most recent book is Where I Was From (2003), which contains both new and collected essays about California and her somewhat ambivalent relationship to the state. She also contributes regularly to the New York Times Review of Books.
