DIDION, Joan.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Run River. First edition, with signed bookplate loosely inserted. This is Didion's first novel, in which she examines the collapsing relationship of the descendants of Californian pioneers. Didion's impact on the literary essay is clear, but equally significant was her influence on the Californian literary aesthetic, evident in this breakthrough work. As Brett Easton Ellis writes, "the thing that most lastingly stayed with me is Didion's individualism and her staunch belief in being your own person and in sticking to your guns, in that Californian, pioneer-woman way" (Alta).This novel was written towards the end of her tenure at Vogue magazine, where she started as a copywriter after winning an essay competition during her senior year of college. She honed her skills, writing copy and photograph captions, and progressed to the role of feature editor by the time Run River was published. Reflecting on her time at the magazine, she wrote, "we were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs... less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion" (The Marginalian).Run River was edited by her friend John Gregory Dunne, who she would marry in 1964. Dunne's death would become the subject of her much celebrated meditation on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking.

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