Joan Didion

Joan Didion was an American essayist, novelist, journalist and screenwriter whose cool, precise prose helped shape modern literary nonfiction. Born in Sacramento, California, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956 and moved to New York to work at Vogue, where her career in journalism began.

Her essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) examined California and American life in the 1960s and 1970s. She also wrote novels, including Run River (1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977) and Democracy (1984), and works of reporting such as Salvador (1983), Miami (1987) and Political Fictions (2001). With John Gregory Dunne she wrote screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park.

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), her account of the year after Dunne's sudden death, won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. She followed it with the memoir Blue Nights (2011), and her later collections include South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Didion died in New York in 2021.