Run, River is the debut novel of Joan Didion, first published in 1963.

Summary

The novel is both a portrait of a marriage and a commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily Knight McClellan, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them (murder and betrayal) is suggested as an epilogue to the pioneer experience.

Didion on Run, River

In her 2003 book of essays Where I Was From, Didion turned a critical eye on this novel, calling the novel 's nostalgia pernicious. She recalled writing it as a homesick girl lately moved from California to New York, and judged it to be a work of false nostalgia, the construction of an idyllic myth of rural Californian life that she knew never to have existed.

Original title

In a 1978 interview, Didion said that she had intended the title to be Run River but that the English publisher, Jonathan Cape, inserted a comma; "but it wasn't of very much interest to me because I hated it both ways. The working title was In the Night Season", which her American publisher did not like.