As the westward trek had weathered her ancestors, the journey back East tested her literary stamina and achievement without softening her Western perspective."
During her eight years at Vogue, Didion rose to the post of associate features editor and had begun contributing book and film reviews to National Review and Mademoiselle. She moved to California with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to launch her career as a freelance writer. Despite a rocky start, Didion soon drew acclaim for her essays.
Reputation as Essayist
Much of Didion's most celebrated writing has been in the form of essays. Her first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968. The book was a collection of essays that had been previously published in such periodicals as American Scholar, California Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post. As noted in American Writers, Didion, along with such writers as Norman Mailer, Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal, were hailed as "New Journalists," meaning the writers borrowed techniques from fiction to craft stylish, compelling non-fiction.
In her critical work Joan Didion, Katherine Usher Henderson observed that "in both her essays and her fiction, Didion seeks to render the moral complexity of contemporary American experience, especially the dilemmas and ambiguities resulting from the erosion of traditional values by a new social and political reality.
