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See Also

Counterculture

Drug Culture

Flower Children

Haight-Ashbury

Literature

Norman Mailer

San Francisco as Cultural Mecca

Susan Sontag

The 1960s in America

Joan Didion

by Carl Rollyson

One of the nation’s leading novelists and journalists, Didion is also an accomplished screenwriter, hailed for her impressive command of American culture on both the East and West Coasts.

Early Life

Joan Didion, an only child, grew up in an old California family and steeped herself in the history of the West. She attended high school in California and was graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in English. In 1956, she won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris prize for young writers and moved to New York to work as a journalist, becoming a novelist in the early 1960’s. The city, she has said, represented to her the whole gamut of experiences a young writer should encounter. She wrote feature pieces for National Review and Mademoiselle.

The 1960’s

Run River (1963), Didion’s California novel (covering the years 1938-1959), received mixed reviews and relatively little attention. Beginning in the mid-1960’s, however, her pieces in The Saturday Evening Post distinguished her as one of the United States’ foremost essayists one of the first to provide incisive and novelistic commentary on the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and on related episodes in what she deemed the “California dream.” An acute observer with a good ear for 1960’s speech rhythms, Didion captured both the joy of American iconoclasts and the apocalyptic mood that resulted from the assassinations of this decade. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) is her classic volume of reportage and commentary on the American scene. The collection’s title evokes a line from William Butler Yeats’s great poem, The Second Coming, which is the quintessential expression of dread over the violence of the twentieth century.

Joan Didion.

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(Quintana Roo Dunne)

Later Life

Didion’s stature as a novelist was enhanced with the publication of Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). She also continued her fine reportage in The White Album (1979) and other book-length works while collaborating with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, on numerous screenplays. Didion and Dunne have owned homes in California and New York and have written on the contrasts between the two coasts.

Impact

To a large extent, Didion’s essay writing helped define the cultural and political mood of the 1960’s. She is regularly cited in histories of the decade, along with Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal. She is distinguished from them, however, in her firm grasp not only of contemporary life but also of California history. Less philosophical than Sontag, less cynical than Vidal, and less focused on her personality than Mailer, she offers a more empirical view of 1960’s events and sensibilities.

Additional Information

Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations (1984), edited by Ellen G. Friedman, includes key interviews with Didion as well as important discussions of her major work, and Katherine Usher Henderson’s Joan Didion (1981) provides a succinct introduction to Didion’s work, with a chronology, notes, and bibliography.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Rollyson, Carl. "Joan Didion." The 1960s in America, edited by Carl Singleton, Salem Press, 1999. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1960_4030013911.
APA 7th
Rollyson, C. (1999). Joan Didion. In C. Singleton (Ed.), The 1960s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rollyson, Carl. "Joan Didion." Edited by Carl Singleton. The 1960s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 1999. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.