Didion, Joan
[key], 1934–2021, American writer, b. Sacramento, Calif., Univ. of
California, Berkeley (B.A., 1956). Her works often explore the despair of
contemporary American life, a condition she views as produced by the
disintegration of morality and values. She is known for a cool and almost
brittle style that emphasizes the concrete. Her novels include Run
River (1963), A Book of Common Prayer (1977),
Salvador (1983), Democracy (1984), and
The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Didion also has
written screenplays (with her late husband John Gregory Dunne)
as well as journalistic and critical pieces for such periodicals as the
New Yorker and New York Review of
Books..
Among her books of essays the two most important are Slouching
toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album
(1979), both groundbreaking analyses of contemporary life and culture that
combine the personal with the topical. Later essay collections include
After Henry (1992) and Political
Fictions (2001). Other works include Where I Was
From (2003), part memoir, part disenchanted revisionist
portrait of California, and the memoirs The Year of Magical
Thinking (2005; National Book Award for Nonfiction), an account
of the grief-filled year that followed her husband's sudden death, and
Blue Nights (2011), the anguished story of her grown
daughter's death. Among many honors and awards Didion was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters (1981) and awarded the National Medal
of the Arts (2013)
See biography by T. Daugherty (2016); studies by K. U. Henderson (1981), E. G. Friedman, ed.
(1984), M. R. Winchell (rev. ed. 1989), S. Felton, ed. (1994), S. F.
Parker, ed. (2019), K.M. Vandenberg (2021), and C. Brobeck (2022);
documentary dir. by G. Dunne, her nephew (2017).
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