When one's thoughts gravitate towards American Literature and the finest writers to have ever emerged as part of one of the most widely read canons around the world, there is a tendency to prescribe such renown to those with ties to Northeast and the Deep South of United States.

With names such as Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, and Philip Roth to names just barely a quarter of handful -- writers of various movements, and styles from across different generations, and times who's renown has grown as tall as the highest skyscraper in New York, and as fruitful as the lushest plantation in Mississippi -- it's hard not to privilege such parts of the United States with a reverence that is perhaps, rightfully deserved.

Nevertheless, while New York was busy enthralled by the latest Thomas Pynchon novel along with also having recently rediscovered its long lost love for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", out West, among the quiet suburbs of Sacramento, California, a city that even few Californians paid much heed to lost beneath the glamorous bliss of the booming film industry in Los Angeles, arose a writer named Joan Didion. Praised for her literary journalism and memoirs that identified and observed American subcultures for mainstream audiences, Didion also immersed her incisive hand into fiction, further reinforcing her trademarked style of exploring the issues of individual and social fragmentation in an America that was changing faster than the people who lived in it.

At 84, and likely to stick around a little longer, there still remains a chance that Joan Didion might spare more of her insights and convictions from a long lost generation to one very much in need of insight and conviction. Before those of such a lifetime, pass into a generation that is long lost.