Ted Streshinsky Photographic Archive
Joan Didion has been canonised for her prose style, worshipped for her actual style (those sunglasses, that bob) and elevated to the status of cultural icon for her deft, distinctive reportage. She is particularly known for her coverage of California in the 1960s, which uncovered the realities of life there, the beautiful and the ugly. In fact, it s hard to see where this doyenne of letters begins and that seminal period ends. The summer of love, the Manson murders and the Black Panthers, were all events and movements she both reported on and found herself physically immersed in. In what was to become a defining characteristic of her writing throughout her career, she was somehow always both apart from, and fundamentally within the story.