Joan Didion

Joan Didion , 1934-, American writer, b. Sacramento, Calif., grad. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1956. Her works often explore the despair of contemporary American life, a condition she views as produced by the disintegration of morality and values. She is known for a cool and almost brittle style that emphasizes the concrete. Her novels include Run River (1963), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Salvador (1983), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Among her books of essays are Slouching toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), groundbreaking analyses of then-contemporary life and culture that combine the personal with the topical, and later collections such as After Henry (1992) and Political Fictions (2001). Didion has written screenplays (with her late husband John Gregory Dunne) as well as journalistic and critical pieces for such magazines as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She is also the author of Where I Was From (2003), part memoir, part disenchanted revisionist portrait of California, and of the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), an account of the grief-filled year that followed the death of her husband.

Bibliography: See studies by K. U. Henderson (1981), E. G. Friedman, ed. (1984), M. R. Winchell (rev. ed. 1989), and S. Felton, ed. (1994).

Didion, Joan (1934– ), American essayist and novelist, known for her uncompromising depictions of contemporary American society, in collections of essays such as Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), in which the deteriorating California of the 1960s comes to represent the decline in seriousness of the USA and the world. This was followed by The White Album (1979) and Sentimental Journeys (1993; originally published as After Henry, 1992), where she brings her laconic prose and sense of cultural despair to scrutinize three American cities. Her novels, which deal with the difficulties faced by women in a patriarchal society, include Play It As It Lays (1970), and The Book of Common Prayer (1977). Salvador (1983) describes a repressive political regime. Miami (1987) traces the attempts of marginalized Hispanic communities to integrated into society. Political Fictions (2001) is a collection of essays on American politics between 1988 and 2000.