Didion, Joan (dĭd`ēŏn), 1934–, American writer, b. Sacramento, Calif., grad. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 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). Among her books of essays are Slouching toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), groundbreaking analyses of then-contemporary life and culture that combine the personal with the topical, and later collections such as After Henry (1992) and Political Fictions (2001). Didion has written screenplays (with her late husband John Gregory Dunne) as well as journalistic and critical pieces for such magazines as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She is also the author of Where I Was From (2003), part memoir, part disenchanted revisionist portrait of California, and of the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), an account of the grief-filled year that followed the death of her husband.

Bibliography

See studies by K. U. Henderson (1981), E. G. Friedman, ed. (1984), M. R. Winchell (rev. ed. 1989), and S. Felton, ed. (1994).

Didion, Joan

(born Dec. 5, 1934, Sacramento, Calif., U.S.) U.S. novelist and essayist. Her writing explores disorder and personal and social unrest. Her first novel was published in 1963; later novels include Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Her essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) are perceptive, clear-eyed analyses of American culture. With her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she has written a number of screenplays, including A Star Is Born (1976). Her later works of nonfiction include Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), and The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).

Didion, Joan (1934– ) writer; born in Sacramento, Calif. She was associate feature editor of Vogue (1956–63). Returning to California, she began to write the essays and articles that became her special genre: highly personal commentaries on contemporary events that offer a generally apocalyptic view of social disintegration in the U.S.A. Her books of essays, fiction, and reportage included Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), and Salvador (1983). She collaborated with her husband John Gregory Dunne (married 1964) on screenplays.