Joan Didion

Lore & Background

Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Eduene and Frank Reese Didion. She had one younger brother, James Jerrett Didion. Didion recalled writing from age five and identified as a shy, bookish child who overcame social anxiety through acting and public speaking. During adolescence, she typed out Ernest Hemingway's works to study his sentence structures. Her early education was nontraditional due to her father's military career; the family moved frequently, making her feel like a perpetual outsider. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956, winning the Vogue 'Prix de Paris' essay contest her senior year, which led to a job as a copywriter at the magazine.

Didion worked at Vogue from 1956 to 1964, rising from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor. While there, she wrote her first novel, Run, River (1963), about a Sacramento family. She married writer John Gregory Dunne in 1964, and they moved to Los Angeles, adopting a daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in 1966. Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in 1968, a collection of magazine pieces exemplifying New Journalism. Her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1970), is considered a classic of American fiction. She and Dunne co-wrote screenplays including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and Up Close & Personal (1996).

In 1991, Didion wrote a New York Review of Books piece that was among the earliest mainstream media articles to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. Her husband died suddenly in December 2003, and her daughter was critically ill. Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a memoir of that year, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She adapted it into a Broadway play in 2007. In 2013, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the 2017 Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.

Reader's Guide

Joan Didion's significance lies in her role as a pioneer of New Journalism, blending novelistic techniques with nonfiction reporting to capture the cultural and political currents of her time. Her writing from the 1960s through the 1970s engaged audiences with the counterculture, Hollywood, and California's history and culture. Her novel Play It As It Lays was recognized by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s focused on political rhetoric and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, and she was an early voice questioning the convictions of the Central Park Five. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking earned major literary awards and was adapted for the stage. Didion's legacy endures through her distinctive voice, her influence on literary journalism, and her unflinching examination of personal and public crises.

Did You Know?

• Didion won the Vogue 'Prix de Paris' essay contest in her senior year at UC Berkeley, earning a job as a copywriter at the magazine.
• She typed out Ernest Hemingway's works during adolescence to learn how his sentence structures worked.
• Didion was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2013.