0
    • Elementary Secondary Higher Ed Common Reads
    0 0
    Download high-resolution image Look inside

    Salvador

    Part of Vintage International

    Author Joan Didion
    Look inside
    Paperback
    $17.00 US
    Knopf | Vintage
    On sale Apr 26, 1994 | 112 Pages | 9780679751830
    Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

    See Additional Formats
    Didion turns her powers of observation to El Salvador in the early 1980s, delivering a devastating anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and its intimate relation to our own country’s foreign policy. As Didion travels from battlefields to body dumps; interviews a puppet president; and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion performs the stations of a country’s martyrdom. Her alertness extends from the warning click of firearms along a fashionable street to the tortuous efforts with which American embassy personnel tried to “sell” Salvador’s murderous regime. The result is a controlled yet blistering work, horribly germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.
    JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
     
    Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
     
    In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

    Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021. View titles by Joan Didion

    "No one has interpreted the place better.... Salvador shines with enlightening observation, and its language is lean and precise, in short what we have come to expect from Ms. Didion." —The New York Times Book Review

    "[Didion has] the instincts of an exceptional reporter and the focus of a historian [as well as] a novelist's appreciation for the surreal. . . . Her clarity of style illuminates the vast darkness that engulfs El Salvador." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

    "Everything [Didion] writes grows out of close observation of the social landscape of El Salvador. And it is quite impossible to deny the artistic brilliance of her reportage. She brings the country to life so that it ends up invading our flesh." —The New York Times

    About

    Didion turns her powers of observation to El Salvador in the early 1980s, delivering a devastating anatomy of that country’s particular brand of terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and its intimate relation to our own country’s foreign policy. As Didion travels from battlefields to body dumps; interviews a puppet president; and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear,” Didion performs the stations of a country’s martyrdom. Her alertness extends from the warning click of firearms along a fashionable street to the tortuous efforts with which American embassy personnel tried to “sell” Salvador’s murderous regime. The result is a controlled yet blistering work, horribly germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

    Author

    JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
     
    Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
     
    In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

    Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021. View titles by Joan Didion

    Praise

    "No one has interpreted the place better.... Salvador shines with enlightening observation, and its language is lean and precise, in short what we have come to expect from Ms. Didion." —The New York Times Book Review

    "[Didion has] the instincts of an exceptional reporter and the focus of a historian [as well as] a novelist's appreciation for the surreal. . . . Her clarity of style illuminates the vast darkness that engulfs El Salvador." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

    "Everything [Didion] writes grows out of close observation of the social landscape of El Salvador. And it is quite impossible to deny the artistic brilliance of her reportage. She brings the country to life so that it ends up invading our flesh." —The New York Times

    Additional formats

    Other books in this series

    Other Books by this Author

    Related Articles

    Literature

    Remembering Joan Didion (1934–2021)

    Joan Didion, who passed away on December 23, 2021, was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics. Parul Sehgal described the prolific writer as “preoccupied with, and troubled by, mythos—of youth, of America’s founding, of social

    Read more

    Remembering Joan Didion (1934–2021)

    Literature
    Subscribe

    Penguin Random House Higher Education

    © 2026 Penguin Random House

    Back to Top
    0
    Wish List (0)