Throughout the 1960s, American cultural criticism regularly warned that the arts were in crisis, amid the growing dominance of cinema, the pace of technological progress, and readers’ shifting sensibilities. Many such trends, including the influence of Hollywood and the nascent tech sector, had California as their epicenter. During those years, Joan Didion’s essays and novels about California catapulted her to the forefront of contemporary discourse as she depicted a destabilizing, centerless time that defied narrative teleology. She was not alone: Eve Babitz, who famously thanked “the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not,” wrote books celebrating California’s disorder, while blurring boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. While these writers are often treated by critics as competitors and opposites, this article traces Didion’s and Babitz’s intellectual and biographical connections and brings their early works into conversation with one another. I examine their writing through the lens of media theory, novel discourse, and art criticism, as mediated through another writer with California ties: Susan Sontag. Through this analysis, I explore these writers’ differing yet overlapping responses to this crisis in storytelling to trace the emergence of a new fiction with a distinct Californian sensibility.

Keywords: Joan Didion; Susan Sontag; Eve Babitz; Nouveau Roman; sentiment