Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)

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The first of Joan Didion’s collections of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem takes its title from the last line of “The Second Coming” (1924) by Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The apocalyptic images of that poem had been, Didion says, her “points of reference” at the time she wrote the title essay in 1967. Faced with what she called a “conviction . . . that the world as I had understood it no longer existed,” she went to San Francisco to learn about the emerging hippie culture in the Haight-Ashbury district: It was necessary, she wrote,...

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