Run, River was published by Ivan Obolensky in 1963, Didion’s first novel, written when she was twenty-eight and working at Vogue. The novel is set in the Sacramento Valley — the agricultural heartland of California where Didion grew up — and it follows the Everett family through the postwar decades as their world (ranching, land, traditional community) is destroyed by development, social change, and their own failures of attention and nerve.
The novel opens with a murder — Lily Everett has shot her husband — and then moves backward and forward in time to show how the family arrived at this crisis. The structure anticipates Didion’s later technique of beginning with catastrophe and working outward to reveal its causes, but the execution is more conventional than her later fiction: the sentences are longer, the style less compressed, the narrative more traditional.
The Sacramento Valley landscape — the rivers, the ranches, the heat, and the gradual encroachment of development — functions as both setting and metaphor. California’s transformation from agricultural to suburban, from community to sprawl, mirrors the Everetts’ personal dissolution. What is lost cannot be recovered, and the novel’s elegiac tone acknowledges this without sentimentality.
Collecting Run, River
First edition (Ivan Obolensky, New York, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $300–$800
- Without jacket: $40–$100
This is scarce in first edition due to the small press and limited print run; it has appreciated significantly as Didion’s reputation has grown.