The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem "remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America - particularly California - in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.