JOAN DIDION
Joan Didion (1934-2021 ) was a novelist, journalist, and memoirist from California who for over 50 years wrote some of the sharpest and most evocative analyses of American culture, politics, and mise en scène. Her novels captured a victorious postwar people struggling with anxieties, doubts, and the chloroform of abundance. Although the literary influences on her seem clear (Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, Graham Greene, noir, perhaps some Beat, definitely New Journalism), she is justly famous for her own cool, distanced, and all-seeing style. Her writing imbues us with awe. If you want to understand America, you must read Didion.
After Henry
After Henry
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Didion’s “reportorial pieces afford the pleasures of literature…. She is an expert geographer of the landscape of American public culture” (The New York Times Book Review).
Here, the National Book Award–winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts.
At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America’s rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won’t go away.
A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Joan Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.