Joan Didion died at the age of 87

Iconic American author Joan Didion died at age 87 of Parkinson’s disease, The New York Times reports. Didion has become best known and recognized for his nonfiction that constantly blurs the lines between journalistic feature and personal essay. For his 1968 collection Kneeling To Bethlehem, he covered musicians like Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, and others. Over the course of his career, Didion has published five novels, six screenplays, and many more nonfiction works. His latest, South and West: From Notebook, released in 2017. Another collection of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, issued earlier this year. Didion is also the subject of a Netflix documentary about his life and work, titled Joan Didion: The Center Won’t Hold.

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, where she grew up reading and writing well. After earning a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and worked as a research assistant at the magazine. He stays on Vogue for seven years, eventually becoming co -editor of magazine features.

Didion published his first novel in 1963, Dagan, Suba. She met her husband, co -writer and editor John Gregory Dunne, while working on the novel, and the two eventually returned to California. Didion and Dunne’s collaboration goes beyond support for each other’s work; they wrote several projects together, including the screenplay of Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Puts, as well as a biography of journalist Jessica Savitch, titled Close & Personal. After the disappearance of Dunne and their daughter Quintana in the early years of the millennium, Didion wrote two books on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Night. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for first.