Joan Didion

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. She went on to publish essays in The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California.

Play It As It Lays (1970), Didion's second novel, is considered a classic work of American fiction; Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest that the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.

With her husband John Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and Up Close & Personal (1996). In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the sudden death of her husband. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the 2017 Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.