The White Album
Essays
By Joan Didion
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Paperback, 9780374532079, 224pp.)
Publication Date: November 10, 2009
Categories: Essays
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First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
Joan Didion is highly regarded as a writer of both nonfiction and fiction and received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2007. She lives in New York City.
“[Didion] can strike at the heart, or the absurdity, of a matter in our contemporary wasteland with quick, graceful strokes.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“All of the essays—even the slightest—manifest not only [Didion’s] intelligence, but an instinct for details that continue to emit pulsations in the reader’s memory and a style that is spare, subtly musical in its phrasing and exact. Add to these her highly vulnerable sense of herself, and the result is a voice like no other in contemporary journalism.” —Robert Towers, The New York Times Book Review
“Didion manages to make the sorry stuff of troubled times (bike movies, for instance, and Bishop James Pike) as interesting and suggestive as the monuments that win her dazzled admiration (Georgia O’Keeffe, the Hoover Dam, the mountains around Bogota). . . A timely and elegant collection.” —The New Yorker
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