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Joan Didion (1934-2021) was one of America's most iconic writers and intellectuals. Her reportage and essays, as well as her novels and memoirs provide sharp comments on a variety of facets of American culture and politics between the 1960s and the 2010s. Employing the complex relationship between life and words as guiding framework, the volume offers fresh approaches to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, The White Album, Democracy and Where I Was From, as well as takes on her final publications The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights and Let Me Tell You What I Mean.
The collection also features photographs of Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, with an accompanying essay by artist and photographer Nancy Ellison, plus a contribution by literary biographer Tracy Daugherty.
List of contents
Notebooks - (auto)biography - photographs - Joan Didion - California - nostalgia - mental landscape - (post)-west - intimacy - reparative reading - LA - anti-sentimentality - Black Panthers - NYC - environmental psychology - place attachment - (dis)illusion - feminism - power - storytelling - abandonment - crossing story
About the author
Cinzia Scarpino is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Milan. Her research interests and publications range from American literature of the 1930s and 1940s and of the second half of the 20th century to environmental studies, screen studies, and Law & Literature.
Eva-Sabine Zehelein is Adjunct Professor of American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. She has published broadly in North American Studies, e.g. on John Updike, contemporary science plays, Alice Munro, Joan Didion, 55+ communities and family trees.
