Joan Didion

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, and graduated from UC Berkeley before winning an essay contest that launched her writing career at Vogue in New York. Returning west, she became a foremost voice of the New Journalism movement alongside Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, chronicling the disintegration of 1960s American counterculture in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979).

With her spare, forensic cadence and acute psychological clarity, Didion also produced acclaimed novels such as Play It as It Lays (1970) and political reporting on El Salvador and Miami. Following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the severe illness of their daughter, she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which won the National Book Award and became an enduring classic on bereavement and survival.