Joan Didion, a resounding voice in American literature who insightfully captured the sixties and California through observant and beautiful language, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87 years old.
The famed writer’s cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by her publisher, Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, to The New York Times. Her friend, the writer Hilton Als, also confirmed the news on Instagram. He posted a black square with the simple caption: “Joan Didion. 12.5.34–12.23.21.”
Didion’s death comes eighteen years after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003. Two years later, Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died of pancreatitis and septic shock. Didion wrote about their passings and the magnitude of grief in her 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
This story will be updated.
Read more of our coverage of Didion’s life and work.
Hollywood 2016
By Lili Anolik
Joan Didion arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 on the way to becoming one of the most important writers of her generation, a cultural icon who changed L.A.’s perception of itself. Lili Anolik mines the author’s early years to examine Didion before all that.
October 2011
By Christoper Hitchens
Photographs by Annie Leibovitz
Joan Didion, here slightly syncopating in the Bob Dylan manner, has striven with intense dignity and courage in Blue Nights to deepen and extend the effect of The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 narrative of the near-simultaneous sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the onset of the fatal illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael.
2005 Hall of Fame
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz
By James Wolcott
Over the years, her novels, including Play It as It Lays (1970) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), turned sparer in their descriptions and tighter in their plots, even as her journalistic works grew denser and showed more engagement with the political world. Her devastating new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award, is a memoir of mourning.
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