Run, River
 | This article needs more citations. (September 2022) |
 First edition | |
| Author | Joan Didion |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Ivan Obolensky |
| Publication date | 1963 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 264 |
| ISBN | 0-006218792 |
| OCLC | 312968389 |
Run River is the debut novel of Joan Didion, first published in 1963.[1]
Summary
[edit]The novel is both a portrait of a marriage and a commentary on the history of California.[2] 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.[2]
Didion on Run River
[edit]In her 2003 book of essays Where I Was From, Didion turned a critical eye on this novel, calling the novel's nostalgia ''pernicious''.[3] 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
[edit]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 it both ways. The working title was In the Night Season", which her American publisher did not like.[4]
References
[edit]- ↑ "The essential Joan Didion: An L.A. Times reading list for newcomers and fans alike". Los Angeles Times. December 23, 2021. Retrieved January 4, 2022.
- 1 2 "Joan Didion's Early Novels of American Womanhood". The New Yorker. November 22, 2019. Retrieved January 4, 2022.
- ↑ Mallon, Thomas (September 28, 2003). "On Second Thought". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 4, 2022.
- ↑ Linda Lipnack Kuehl, "Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71," The Paris Review, Winter, 1978.