The first non-fiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, _Slouching Towards Bethlehem _remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America - particularly California -in the sixties.

Joan Didion focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.