Joan Didion - Biography

Last Editor: axu2020				Joan Didion Biography -   Name : Joan Didion Profession : Journalist/Author Birth Details : born December 5, 1934 Salary : A Star Is Born (1976) $125,000+10% of profits Spouse : John Gregory Dunne (30 January 1964 - 30 December 2003) (his death)

Joan Didion Trivia -

B.A. from U.C. Berkeley [1956] Aunt of actor/director Griffin Dunne. Aunt of actress Dominique Dunne. Sister-in-law of Dominick Dunne.

Joan Didion Detailed Biography -

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer, renowned as a journalist, playwright, essayist, and novelist. Didion contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. With her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City. Didion was born in Sacramento, California and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956. Much of Didion's writing draws from her life in California, particularly during the 1960s as the world in which she grew up "began to seem remote." Her portrayals of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, and sociopaths (including Charles Manson) are now considered part of the canon of American literature. Didion is the author of five novels, including Run River and Play It As It Lays (1970), and eight books of non-fiction. Her collections of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) -- a book described in one review as helping to define California as "the paranoia capital of the world" -- made her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive style of reporting that mixed personal reflection and social analysis. This led her to be associated with members of the New Journalism such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, though Didion's ties to that movement have never been considered particularly strong. In 2001 Didion published Political Fictions, a collection of essays which had first appeared in the New York Review of Books. Whereas earlier books such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album had ridiculed various aspects of liberalism (the counterculture, bureaucratic social planners, etc.), the criticism in Political Fictions was targeted at political conservatives, with pieces skewering Newt Gingrich and the Religious Right. Didion attributed her shift in sympathies to the Republican Party's own shift away from what she considered to be the values of Barry Goldwater, whom she had supported in 1964. Where I Was From (2003), a memoir, exegeses on California mythologies, and on the author's relationship to her birthplace and to her mother. Indirectly, it also serves as a rumination on the American frontier myth and the culture that we see today in California as a direct consequence of a population of survivalists who made it "through the Sierra," finally posing the question "at what cost progress?" Didion's latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published October 4, 2005. The book-length essay chronicles the year following her husband's death, during which Didion's daughter, Quintana, was also gravely ill. The book is both a vivid personal account of losing a mate after 40 years of professional collaboration and marriage, and a broader attempt to describe the mechanism that governs grief and mourning. In November 2005, it won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Although during the period of the book their daughter seemed to recover, she died of complications from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, in New York City at age 39 after an extended period of illness. The New York Times reported that Didion would not change the book to reflect her daughter's death. "It's finished," she said. Run River (1963) Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Play It as It Lays (1970) A Book of Common Prayer (1977) The White Album (1979) Salvador (1983) Democracy: A Novel (1984) Miami (1987) Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays (1990) ISBN 0374521727 After Henry (1992) The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) Political Fictions (2001) Where I Was From (2003) ISBN 0679433325 The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) ISBN 140004314X