Didion was hardly alone in sensing that the very center which had held America together could no longer hold together. The term is literary shorthand for the symbolic splintering and fragmentation of every the breakdown of the whole into its smallest, disconnected units.īetween the appearance of “On Self-Respect” in Vogue in 1961 and “California Dreaming” in a 1967 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, the only thing that underwent a dramatic and often drastic change in America was everything. This awareness that the center of American society was very quickly starting to unthread and would soon come apart would come to be expressed by Didion through her concept of atomization.

The non-fiction observation of the changing world of the 1960s as a whole-along with the the distinct imprint of Californian thought on that change-coalesces into the tie that binds. As for the genuinely unifying theme, a hint is contained in the title, which is taken from a William Butler Yeats poem that also offers the following dire statement: “Things fall apart the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' As for flesh and blood characters, they range from John Wayne to the Flower Children of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, to the figure of Howard Hughes in his heyday, before he was already halfway to crazed recluse he would become by the time Didion wrote about him. Among the periodicals in which the contents appeared are the American Scholar and the New York Times Magazine.Ĭalifornia culture, as it inexorably transformed and moved to its epicenter in the Age of Aquarius, is really the dominant character of the anthology at the very least, it is the unifying theme. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of Joan Didion’s nonfiction articles and essays, originally published in various magazines throughout most of the 1960s.

We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

Slouching towards bethlehem español