White premium weight 100% cotton certified organic TSPTR tee with water based ink print on front

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Joan Didion is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with the likes of Gay Talese, Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Didion wrote numerous essays for Life, Esquire, The New York Review and The New Yorker among others. Her writing during the 1960s through to the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the 60s counterculture, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and exposing US foreign policy in Latin America.

In 1968, Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. It has been described as a pinnacle of New Journalism, using novel-like writing to cover the non-fiction realities of hippie counterculture. She wrote from her personal perspective; adding her own feelings and memories to situations, inventing details and quotes to make the stories more vivid, and using metaphors that gave the reader a better understanding of the disorder present in the subjects of her essays: politicians, artists, or American life.

In 1979 she released what is considered to be her finest work, The White Album. A collection of essays centred around the abrupt end of the 1960s focusing on the cultural effect of the Manson Family murders; also writing about hanging out with the Doors in the recording studio, visiting Black Panther Huey Newton in jail, and navigating her own anxiety and suitcase-packing practices as a reporter during the late 1960s.

The first sentence of “The White Album” furnishes one of Didion’s most quoted lines: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She goes on to explain, through the rest of the essay, what she means: that humans survive the confusion and brutality of life by trying to find connections between events and extract meaning from those connections. We’re constantly trying to force seemingly random happenings into the framework of a story that might teach or show us something. But Didion isn’t so sure that the meaning we crave is truly available to us.

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