The White Album

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." So begins Joan Didion's legendary essay collection The White Album, a landmark literary mosaic by one of American writing's true greats illuminating in unerring prose subjects ranging from the Manson cult to the Black Panthers, from painter Georgia O'Keefe to the author's own struggles with depression and anxiety in the late 1960s. In "Good Citizens," we meet the First Lady of California Nancy Reagan. Early in the title essay, we meet lead singer Jim Morrison of the pioneering L.A. rock band The Doors. We meet Oakland revolutionary Huey Newton, leaders of the woman's movement, a veteran Malibu lifeguard, a celebrated orchid grower. These and many others come under Didion's magnifying lens, her unsurpassed eye for the evocative detail. Locations—Hollywood and Berkeley; Hawaii and the Hoover Dam; the author's hometown of Sacramento; Bogatá—are captured with the same uncanny vividness. A flawlessly executed mix of people and place portraits with fresh-angle consideration of American cultural trends and movements, this deeply influential collection is also a breakthrough work of autobiography. Bravely, with remarkable precision, Didion charts her own interior journey during a tumultuous time: breakdown, recovery, and insights in a life whose roles included wife and mother of a young daughter along with her career as a journalist and novelist. This first-ever digital edition introduces a new generation of readers to a contemporary master, a writer of whom reviewer John Leonard in The New York Times declared, "Nobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion."