Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America

Joan Didion was a writer uniquely attuned to the disorder and fragmentation of our times, the dizzying changes overtaking America since the 1960s, when, as she wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” lines from Yeats’s famous poem “ The Second Coming ” reverberated “in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there”: For Didion,