American author and journalist Joan Didion dead at 87

American author and journalist Joan Didion, a literary icon known for chronicling 1960s California, died Thursday, December 23 at the age of 87, reported the New York Times (paid article in English). The writer, author of several screenplays for the cinema, died at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson’s disease, the daily reported.

A figure in the great American tradition of literary journalism, Joan Didion had 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 had not been successful, she left to document the hippie counterculture in San Francisco in 1967, for the Saturday Evening Post. From this dive had emerged a famous text, Slouching towards Bethlehem, first-person report, which had made him famous.

Returning to New York with her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, she was later initiated into political journalism, whose experiences she had gathered in a 2001 collection, Political Fictions. Some had later seen, in his description of a “professional political class” disconnected from the daily life of voters, a premonitory warning from the Trump era. After the death of her husband and daughter, she had also drawn energy from her grief to write two autobiographical accounts, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007) – awarded the prestigious National Book Award – and The Blue of the Night (2011).