Iconic US writer Joan Didion dies at 87
- The author and essayist behind beloved works like Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking was known for her insight and prose style
- Didion’s life was marked by both Hollywood glamour and deep grief, including the deaths of first her husband in 2003, then her daughter soon after
Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American society, as well as her grief over the deaths of her husband and daughter, has died at the age of 87.
The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, her publisher Knopf said on Thursday in a statement.
Didion first emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism”, which allowed writers to take a narrative, more personalised perspective.
Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a title borrowed from poet William Butler Yeats, looked at the culture of her native California. The title essay offered an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco and a New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years”.
Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday frequently was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from a hand. She was 80 in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for its sunglasses.