Joan Didion, a resounding voice in American literature who insightfully captured the ’60s and California through observant and beautiful language, died on Thursday at home in Manhattan. She was 87 years old.
The famed writer’s cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by her publisher, Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, toThe New York Times. Her friend, the writer Hilton Als, also confirmed the news on Instagram. He posted a black square with the simple caption: “Joan Didion. 12.5.34–12.23.21.”
Didion’s death comes 18 years after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003. (Dunne’s brother was longtime V.F. special correspondent Dominick Dunne.)
Two years later, Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died of pancreatitis and septic shock.
Didion became renowned for her linguistic froideur, keen insights, and provocative yet elegant prose, writing fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays over the course of her lengthy career. But she saved her most personal subjects for last. Her acclaimed 2005book, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she grappled with the unexpected death of her husband, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She also attempted to come to terms with the death of her child in 2011’sBlue Nights.
Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento to Frank and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion. The author was a fifth-generation Californian descended from settlers who parted ways with the Donner party in 1846 before that group met its infamous end. During her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, Didion entered a short story contest inMademoiselle, winning a spot as the magazine’s guest fiction editor. The following year, she won another essay contest forVogue, turning down the prize of a trip to Paris in favor of a job at the magazine.
With her groundbreaking articles on post-war culture published inLifemagazine andThe Saturday Evening Post,Didion quickly established a name for herself as a leading figure in the New Journalism movement, which included such authors as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, who blurred the lines of traditional reporting. She went on to write her two most-acclaimed essay collections,Slouching Towards BethlehemandThe White Album. “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests,” she wrote in the former collection. “And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Author Katie Roiphe told theTimesin an interview, “Her talent was for writing about the mood of the culture. She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s through her own highly idiosyncratic and personal—that is, seemingly personal—writing. She was perfectly matched to the times, with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, high-strung sensibility. It was a perfect conjunction of the writer with the moment.”
The critic John Leonard once wrote of her work, accordingto the Los Angeles Times, “Nobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion. Try to rearrange one of her sentences, and you’ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.” And while presenting her with the National Humanities Medal in 2012, President Barack Obamacalled her “one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture.”
Read more of our coverage of Didion’s life and work.
Hollywood 2016
By Lili Anolik
Joan Didion arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 on the way to becoming one of the most important writers of her generation, a cultural icon who changed L.A.’s perception of itself. Lili Anolik mines the author’s early years to examine Didion before all that.
October 2011
