"The White Album is a mosaic of a time, a mosaic that includes, among other bizarre artifacts and personalities, the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson Family and the Ferguson brothers, the story of Bishop James Pike, and of John Paul Getty's museum, the biker cult, the saga of the California governor's mansions, the romance of water in an arid landscape, the swirl and confusion of the Sixties (the women's movement, the Panthers, Berkeley), and the experience of getting away--to Bogotá, to Las Vegas, the Islands, the road or simply to bed--and coming home again"--Cover.

"Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right la

"In the 1980s and 1990s, even as successive administrations hailed 'morning in America' and 'a thousand points of light,' Joan Didion brought her brilliant and impeccably stylish prose to bear on the darker truths of American empire. Gathered here for the first time in this second volume of Library of America's definitive edition are her masterful novels and nonfiction from this period, five complete book-length works. 'Terror,' Didion writes in Salvador (1983) at the height of that country's civil war, 'is the given of the place. . . . Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stations.' Her powerful and incisive reporting measures the perverse distance between such abstractions as Communism, human rights, and democracy in Central America and the senseless violence she is witness to. Often considered Didion's finest novel, Democracy (1984) tells a story of Inez Victor, daughter of an old money

A compilation of essays and nonfiction writings spanning more than forty years includes the author's reflections on politics, lifestyle, place, and cultural figures, including such topics as Haight-Ashbury, the Manson family, the Black Panthers, California earthquakes, and Bill Clinton.