Influential chronicler of American society
Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American society, as well as her grief over the deaths of her husband and daughter, has died at the age of 87.
The cause of death was Parkinson's disease, her publisher Knopf said on Thursday in a statement.
Didion first emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism,” which allowed writers to take a narrative, more personalized perspective.
Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a title borrowed from poet William Butler Yeats, looked at the culture of her native California. The title essay offered an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco and a New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years.”
Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday frequently was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from a hand. She was 80 in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for its sunglasses.
Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in Blue Nights.
Didion's works were insightful, confessional and tinged with ennui and skepticism. The Los Angeles Times praised her as an “unparalleled stylist” with “piercing insights and exquisite command of language.”
“I write entirely 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 in Berkeley, in 1975.
Her life and career were captured in the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold by her nephew, actor-filmmaker Griffin Dunne. The New Yorker magazine called the film, which borrowed its title from another Yeats work, “an intimate, affectionate, and partial portrait.”
Didion ended up in New York by winning a college essay contest that provided an internship at Vogue magazine in the late 1950s. She met Dunne there two years later.
Didion and Dunne, who were married nearly 40 years, split their lives between Southern California and New York and managed to be leading figures in both literary circles and Hollywood.
The parties at their Malibu beach house, where Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter before Star Wars fame, drew crowds that included singer Janis Joplin, moviemakers Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese and actor Warren Beatty, who was reportedly infatuated with Didion.