Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's seminal essay collection in which she narrates the political and social climate of 1960s America through the unique lens that would soon establish her as a supreme chronicler of American life. In 20 crackingly sharp essays, Didion addresses the beauty, ugliness and fragility of the decade: the slippage of the Californian Dream; the hippy counterculture of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco; the recent case of a California suburban housewife who, one night when they ran out of milk, set fire to her husband; a Las Vegas wedding chapel; a millionaire bunkered in his mansion, and a handful of personal pieces including musings about returning home to Sacramento for a family visit and a beautiful elegy for her younger self on first going to live in New York.