Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It was published on May 10, 1968, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. The full poem was an epigraph to the book while only the last six lines from the first stanza were included in the title essay as it first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1967. The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006).
Collection's origins
According to Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, the book came about this way: "In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion [was ...] engaged to write a regular column for The Saturday Evening Post. [...] At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she'd churned out while a junior editor at Vogue), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was Slouching Towards Bethlehem."