Joan Didion

"Faced with the deaths of her husband and her only child within a two-year span, Joan Didion confronted a grief that 'none of us know until we reach it.' Two of her finest works, 'The Year of Magical Thinking' (a winner of the National Book Award) and 'Blue Nights,' chart this experience with startling honesty. These unforgettable memoirs, and the dramatic adaptation 'The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play,' are brought together here in the capstone volume in Library of America's definitive edition of one of our most original and influential literary figures. Didion's incomparable brand of journalism is on display in 'Political Fictions' and 'Fixed Ideas,' which cast a wry and critical eye over the media spectacles of American politics. In 'Where I Was From,' she revisits the foundational myths and darker realities of her native California. 'South and West' presents the best of her journals of the 1970s."--Dust jacket.