At once romantic and jaundiced, elegiac and cold-eyed, her pieces largely defined the state-or, more accurately, the Central Valley and Los Angeles-for two generations of readers who came to see it through her eyes rather than their own. She set her first novel, Run River (1963), written when she was twenty-eight, in her native Sacramento Valley, but her reputation as California diviner rests on her astonishing first two books of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). For the past forty years Joan Didion has taken upon herself the task of explaining, or at least exposing, California to the New York literary world.
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