Although the Santa Ana winds of Southern California have blown for millennia through the mountain passes and canyons east of Los Angeles, their literary canonisation as a cultural force is often dated to Raymond Chandler's essay Red Wind (1938) and subsequent noir fiction, but their definitive literary treatment came with Joan Didion's essay Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream (1966, collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem) and The Santa Ana (1968), published in The Saturday Evening Post from New York. Didion described the Santa Ana as a wind that 'shows us how close to the edge we are,' making the seasonal hot, dry, fire-driving wind a metaphor for California's psychological instability and social violence. The Santa Ana has since become one of American literature's most richly theorised regional weather phenomena.

Didion's treatment of the Santa Ana as a literary and psychological force elevated regional wind into a symbol of American existential anxiety and social fragility, influencing generations of California writers from T.C. Boyle to Dana Goodyear. The tradition of attributing emotional and moral effects to specific named winds — a practice as old as the ancient world — received its most sophisticated modern literary articulation in Didion's prose, connecting her to the classical wind-as-fate tradition. The Santa Ana winds continue to appear in contemporary poetry and fiction as shorthand for the combustible, apocalyptic quality of California's landscape and culture.