The American writer Joan Didion has died at the age of 87 at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to her editorial.
Joan Didion (Sacramento, California, 1934) was one of the most important writers in the United States, the author of a vast work between essays, memoirs, novels, and scripts.
Didion began her career in the 1960s as one of the first authors of the “new journalism. ” Her 1968 collection of essays “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” a title borrowed from the poet William Butler Yeats, examines the culture of her native California. The title essay offered an unkind take on emerging hippie culture in San Francisco, and a New York Times review called the book “some of the best magazine articles published in this country in recent years.”
Didion had an air of casual glamor and, at the height of her fame, she was often photographed wearing oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from one hand. She was 80 years old in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for their sunglasses.
The tragedy unexpectedly led to a revival of her career in the 2000s when Didion wrote about the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking and of her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in Blue Nights.
The Year of Magical Thinking earned him the prestigious National Book Award; She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Critics’ Circle Prize.
Didion’s works were insightful, confessional, and tinged with boredom and skepticism. British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the “poet of the great Californian void” and noted that she was particularly incisive in writing about the state. Her 1970 novel As The Game Comes depicted the city of Los Angeles through the eyes of a troubled actor, as glamorous and bland, while the 2003 collection of essays Where I Was From was about state culture and about herself and her family’s long history there.
” I write to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means,” Didion said in a speech at her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, in 1975.
Her life and career were captured in the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, which was made by her nephew, actor, and filmmaker Griffin Dunne.
California To New York
Didion moved from California to New York after winning a college essay contest that allowed her to be a fellow at Vogue magazine in the late 1950s. There she met Dunne two years later.
Didion and Dunne, who were married for almost 40 years, divided their lives between Southern California and New York and became prominent figures in both literary circles and Hollywood. The parties at her beach house in Malibu, where Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter before jumping to fame with The Star Wars, attracted crowds that included singer Janis Joplin, filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, and actor Warren Beatty, who was allegedly in love with Didion.
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
