Joan Didion

Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. In her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and was awarded a job at the magazine’s New York office. Didion worked at Vogue from 1956 to 1964, eventually becoming a contributing writer and assistant features editor. She met her future husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a writer, while living in New York; in fact, Dunne edited her first novel, Run, River (1963).  The couple married in 1964, relocated to Southern California, and adopted their daughter, Quintana, in 1966. The couple wrote magazine pieces during this period, and Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which is considered to be one of the most important books of the 1960s. She published her second novel, Play It as It Lays, in 1970. In the 1970s, Didion and Dunne collaborated on a number of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and a film adaptation of Play It as It Lays (1972). Didion published her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer, in 1977, and the couple returned to New York in the 1990s. Didion’s life took a tragic turn in 2003, when Quintana became critically ill, and Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack in December. Didion recounts her experiences pf mourning Dunne’s death while caring for Quintana in her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which received the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Despite a promising year of recovery, Quintana suffered a series of additional health crises and died in 2005, at age 39. Didion wrote a subsequent memoir, Blue Nights (2011) about Quintana. Didion was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2013 by President Barack Obama, and in 2017, she was the subject of a documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne, called Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Didion died in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at age 87.