American author and journalist Joan Didion died at 87
Sylvie Claire / December 24, 2021
American author and journalist Joan Didion, a literary icon known for her chronicle of 1960s California, died Thursday at 87, The New York Times reported.
The writer, who was also the author of several screenplays for the cinema, died at her home in Manhattan of Parkinson's disease, the newspaper reported.
A figure in the great American tradition of literary journalism, Joan Didion divided her life between California, where she was born in Sacramento on December 5, 1934, and New York.
After a first novel, in 1963, Run River, which was not successful, she went to San Francisco in 1967 to document the hippie counterculture for the Saturday EveningPost. From this dive emerged a famous text, Slouching towards Bethlehem, a first-person reportage, which made her famous.
She returned to New York with her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, and later took up political journalism, which she documented in a 2001 collection, Political Fictions. Her description of a professional political class disconnected from the daily lives of voters was seen by some as a forewarning of the Trump era.
After the death of her husband and daughter, she also drew energy from her grief to write two autobiographical stories, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) - awarded the prestigious National Book Award - and The Blue of Night (2011).