Run, River
''Run, River'' is the debut novel of Joan Didion, first published in 1963. Summary The novel is both a portrait of a marriage and a commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily Knight McClellan, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them (murder and betrayal) is suggested as an epilogue to the pioneer experience. Didion on ''Run, River'' In her 2003 book of essays '' Where I Was From'', Didion turned a critical eye on this novel, calling the novel's nostalgia ''pernicious''. She recalled writing it as a homesick girl lately moved from California to New York, and judged it to be a work of false nostalgia, the construction of an idyllic myth of rural Californian life that she knew never to have existed. Original title In a 1978 interview, Didion said that she had intended the title to be ''Run River'' but that the English publisher, Jonathan Cape, inserted a comma; "but it wasn't of very much interest to me because I hated i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Joan Didion
Joan Didion (; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer. Along with Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese, she is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism. Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by ''Vogue'' magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle and California culture and history. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for ''The Year of Magical Thinking'', a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She late ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Debut Novel
A debut novel is the first novel a novelist publishes. Debut novels are often the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to publish in the future. First-time novelists without a previous published reputation, such as publication in nonfiction, magazines, or literary journals, typically struggle to find a publisher. Sometimes new novelists will self-publish their debut novels, because publishing houses will not risk the capital needed to market books by an unknown author to the public. Most publishers purchase rights to novels, especially debut novels, through literary agents, who screen client work before sending it to publishers. These hurdles to publishing reflect both publishers' limits in resources for reviewing and publishing unknown works, and that readers typically buy more books by established authors with a reputation than first-time writers. For this ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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History Of California
The history of California can be divided into the Native American period (about 10,000 years ago until 1542), the European exploration period (1542–1769), the Spanish colonial period (1769–1821), the Mexican period (1821–1848), and United States statehood (September 9, 1850–present). California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. After contact with Spanish explorers, most of the Native Americans died out from foreign diseases and genocide campaigns. After the Portolá expedition of 1769–70, Spanish missionaries began setting up 21 California missions on or near the coast of Alta (Upper) California, beginning with the Mission San Diego de Alcala near the location of the modern day city of San Diego, California. During the same period, Spanish military forces built several forts (''presidios'') and three small towns (''pueblos''). Two of the pueblos would eventually grow into the cities of Los Angeles and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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American Pioneer
American pioneers were European American and African American settlers who migrated westward from the Thirteen Colonies and later United States to settle in and develop areas of North America that had previously been inhabited or used by Native Americans. The pioneer concept and ethos greatly predate the migration to the Western United States, with which they are commonly associated, and many places now considered "East" were settled by pioneers from even further east. For example, Daniel Boone, a key figure in American history, settled in Kentucky, when that "Dark and Bloody Ground" was still undeveloped. One important development in the Western settlement was the Homestead Act, which provided formal legislation for the settlers which regulated the settlement process. Etymology The word "pioneer" originates with the Middle French ''pionnier'' (originally, a foot soldier, or soldier involved in digging trenches), from the same root as peon or pawn.Philip Durkin, "Lexical b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Where I Was From
''Where I Was From'' is a 2003 collection of essays by Joan Didion. It concerns the history and culture of California, where Didion was born and spent much of her life. The collection combines aspects of historical writing, journalism, and memoir to present a history of California as well as Didion's own experiences in that state. Synopsis The book attempts to understand the differences between California's factual history and its perceived reputation. According to Didion, "This book represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up... misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." ''Where I Was From'' is also in parts a retrospective on Didion's work, examining how these "confusions" affected books such as '' Run, River''. Critical reception Diane Johnson in ''The New York Review of Books'' summarizes the apparent hypocrisies of California cultur ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape is a London publishing firm founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape, who was head of the firm until his death in 1960. Cape and his business partner Wren Howard set up the publishing house in 1921. They established a reputation for high quality design and production and a fine list of English-language authors, fostered by the firm's editor and reader Edward Garnett. Cape's list of writers ranged from poets including Robert Frost and C. Day Lewis, to children's authors such as Hugh Lofting and Arthur Ransome, to James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, to heavyweight fiction by James Joyce and T. E. Lawrence. After Cape's death, the firm later merged successively with three other London publishing houses. In 1987 it was taken over by Random House. Its name continues as one of Random House's British imprints. Cape – biography Early years Herbert Jonathan Cape was born in London on 15 November 1879, the youngest of the seven children of Jonathan Cape, a clerk from ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Linda Lipnack Kuehl
Linda Lipnack Kuehl (January 24, 1940 – February 6, 1978) was an American arts journalist, based in New York City. Intending to write a biography of Billie Holiday, she interviewed friends, fellow performers, and key figures in Holiday's life, but died before its completion. Various other writers' biographies on Holiday have drawn upon Kuehl's material, as did the film '' Billie'' (2019), which is narrated by Kuehl's recorded interviews. She worked as a high school teacher and free lance writer. Arts journalism career Interviews that Kuehl conducted with writers were published in ''The Paris Review'' in 1972 and 1978. She was a Jewish feminist and a fan of Billie Holiday. In 1971, she began plans for a biography of Holiday, who had died aged 44 in 1959. She interviewed almost 200 people—friends, family members, band members, peers from 1930s Harlem, piano players, psychiatrists and a pimp—and was still finding people in 1978. Her archive on Holiday included these interviews ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Paris Review
''The Paris Review'' is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, ''The Paris Review'' published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly. The ''Review''s "Writers at Work" series includes interviews with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov, among many hundreds of others. Literary critic Joe David Bellamy called the series "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world." The headquarters of ''The Paris Review'' moved from Paris to New York City in 1973. Plimpton edited the ''Review'' from its founding until his death in 2003. Brigid Hughes ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1963 American Novels
Events January * January 1 – Bogle–Chandler case: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation scientist Dr. Gilbert Bogle and Mrs. Margaret Chandler are found dead (presumed poisoned), in bushland near the Lane Cove River, Sydney, Australia. * January 2 – Vietnam War – Battle of Ap Bac: The Viet Cong win their first major victory. * January 9 – A total penumbral lunar eclipse is visible in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and is the 56th lunar eclipse of Lunar Saros 114. Gamma has a value of −1.01282. It occurs on the night between Wednesday, January 9 and Thursday, January 10, 1963. * January 13 – 1963 Togolese coup d'état: A military coup in Togo results in the installation of coup leader Emmanuel Bodjollé as president. * January 17 – A last quarter moon occurs between the penumbral lunar eclipse and the annular solar eclipse, only 12 hours, 29 minutes after apogee. * January 19 – Soviet spy Gheorgh ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Novels By Joan Didion
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Novels Set In California
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |