A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures.

BRADLEE, Ben. [Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne].

Item Number: 141544

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

First edition of this classic New York Times bestselling memoir by the legendary Executive Editor of The Washington Post. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Joan and John, Wasps are different, but they value friends. Ben Bradlee.” The recipients, American journalists Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne met in the late 1950s when Didion was working for Vogue. They were soon married and both picked up writing work from book publishers and magazines, traveled together on journalism assignments, and established a working pattern that served for the next 40 years. They had a constant advising, consulting, and editing collaboration. Critically acclaimed bestselling books followed for each, including Dunne’s The Studio and Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion’s work, in particular, engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, California culture, and California history. Writing at the same time Bradlee was acting as executive editor of The Washington Post, Didion gained a reputation as a pioneer of the New Journalism style of news writing and recognition for her sensational novels, including her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine pieces about her experiences in California. 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. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin. Jacket photograph by Bill O’Leary. From the collection of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne with their annotations.

This is the witty, candid story of a daring young man who made his own way to the heights of American journalism and public life, of the great adventure that took him straight from Harvard to almost four years in the shooting war in the South Pacific, and back, from a maverick New Hampshire weekly to an apprenticeship for Newsweek in postwar Paris, then to the Washington Bureau chief's desk, and finally to the apex of his career at The Washington Post.