American Author And Journalist Joan Didion Dies At 87

Joan Didion, a well-known American author and literary icon died on Thursday. She was 87. Didion who came to the limelight in the 1960s is credited with bringing in "new journalism" with her essays on Los Angeles life.

Socialite, screenwriter, essayist and novelist Didion died at her home in Manhattan of Parkinson's disease The New York Times reported. She was well-known as the screenwriter for A Star Is Born 1976. Her early works in the 1968 essay collections include "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", "The White Album," and "Play It as It Lays," a novel about Hollywood lives.

When Joan Didion was 69 her husband who was also her screenwriting partner John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack. Two years later the couple's daughter Quintana Roo died of acute pancreatitis. She was just 39. Her writings on bereavement put her in the spotlight as a writer once again. Her book The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005 is the account of the year following the death husband. The book is considered a classic about mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist at the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2017.

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Didion was profiled in a Netflix documentary titled The Center Will Not Hold, directed by Griffin Dunne. Dunne is her nephew. The author was considered to be extremely protective of her work, even her closest circle of friends did not know what she was about to publish.

Former US President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2013. He described her as "one of the most celebrated American writers of her generation" and "one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture".

Didion was born in December 1934, in Sacramento, California. She was a fifth-generation Californian. Identified as a "shy, bookish child" she wrote down things from the age of five. However, she said that she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published. She read everything she could get her hands on and was greatly inspired by the works of Ernest Hemingway. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley and joined Vogue Magazine after graduation in 1956. During her senior year at college, she won the "Prix de Paris" essay contest sponsored by Vogue. She worked for many years as a successful journalist and writer. She met her husband during her Vogue days. They got married in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles, California became their home for 20 years. 

Didion's early education was not traditional, since her father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II the family constantly relocated, she did not attend school regularly. Didion wrote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From that moving so often made her feel like a perpetual outsider. 

Shelley Wagner, her editor at Knopf, said Didion had been "a wise and subtle teller of truths" adding "We will mourn her death but celebrate her life, knowing that her work will inspire generations of readers and writers to come."