Joan Didion

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday December 23 2021 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87. Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles which explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. Joan Didion was born on Dec. 5, 1934, in Sacramento to Frank and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion. She was a fifth-generation Californian descended from settlers who left the ill-fated Donner party in 1846 and took the safer route. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956 from the University of California, Berkeley. By the early 1960s Ms. Didion was writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle and National Review. In 1964, she married John Gregory Dunne, a writer at Time. They moved to California and started writing screenplays. They also adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo. Mr. Dunne died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003. Two years later, Quintana Roo Dunne died of pancreatitis and septic shock at 39. They rewrote “A Star Is Born” to bring it into the rock ’n’ roll era. With Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson starring, the film became a big box-office success and paid its screenwriters handsomely. Joan Didion left no immediate survivors.