The writer Joan Didion, whose scathing reports on the Californian culture of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the new journalism, has passed away at the age of 87 as a consequence of Parkinson’s disease.
Didion, National Award winner, rose to fame with a series of articles in ‘Life’ magazine and ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ that explored postwar American life, according to Europa Press from ‘The New York Times’.
California, his home state, provided his richest material for his works. “We believed in new beginnings and we believed in good luck. “, wrote in ‘Where I was from’ (2003), a psychological portrait of the state.
Joan Didion (Sacramento, 1934) was a novelist and journalist. A graduate of the University of Berkeley in California, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in letters by Harvard and Yale universities.
She began working at ‘Vogue’ magazine, where she was an editor and film critic, and has been a regular contributor to ‘The New York Review of Books’. Together with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she also wrote screenplays, including ‘As the game comes on’, made into a movie by Frank Perry and starring a young Anthony Perkins.
She was the author of the novels ‘Rio Revolver’, ‘Book of Common Prayer’, ‘Democracy’ and ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’. He has also written several self-fiction books, such as ‘Where I Was From’, ‘Blue Nights’ and the acclaimed ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, which was a winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
He has also published various essay books on American culture and politics, a selection of which is included in ‘Those who dream the American dream’, as well as his unpublished South and West annotations. Most of his work in the Spanish language has been published in Random House Literature.