THE PLACE TO BE
FULL STOP: A Greyhound bus pulls into the town of Midnight in 1969.
MACHA/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY
IN JUNE 1970, Joan Didion went on the road. Aged 36, her reputation assured after the publication of her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she drove from New Orleans to Mississippi and Alabama. She saw snakes and sycamores, barefoot children playing in the dust by gas stations and old people on porches, barely rocking in the heat, just staring. “In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless,” she notes in her new book, South and West, a collection of notes and conversations that act as an alternative travel guide.