Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It was published on May 10, 1968, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. The full poem was an epigraph to the book while only the last six lines from the first stanza were included in the title essay as it first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1967. The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006).