Ein particular she wrote the novel A night season or the scenario of the film Panic in Needle Park, with Al Pacino in the lead role. Joan Didion, an icon of American literature who rose to fame with his California column from the 1960s, died Thursday, December 23, as reported on New York Times. The writer and journalist was 87 years old.
The novelist, author of several screenplays for the cinema, died at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson’s disease, the daily reported.
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Politics, hippie counter-culture …
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 then saw, in his description of a “professional political class” disconnected from the daily life of voters, a premonitory warning of 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).