In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Didion's first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Didion's other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. Here we not only see Didion's signature irony and imagination in play, we're also granted an illuminating glimpse into her mind and process. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento.

'California Notes' began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class, and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. 'Notes on the South' traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. Joan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks-of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. her acute observations of the country's culture and history feel particularly resonant today.' - Harper's Bazaar

Description NATIONAL BESTSELLER - 'One of contemporary literature's most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest.

Joan didion west and south