Read Joan Didion’s Lost Interview with the Grateful Dead (1967)

Without wanting to make too broad a generalization, it’s safe to say that Saturday Evening Post readers probably didn’t understand much about what was going on in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or they didn’t, at least, until the magazine ran “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s simultaneous report from and obituary for the drug-fueled seeker scene that had formed around Haight-Ashbury. Quite possibly her single most widely known piece