Remembering Joan Didion's life and legacy
Learn more about the life and career of Joan Didion.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
-
© Open University (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Learn how Odysseus (or Ulysses) has been portrayed in literature, art, and cinema.
-
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Learn more about women writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
-
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Questions and answers about English writer George Orwell.
-
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The practical concerns of a movie director shooting on location are explored in this video, a 1976 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation, through the filming of Eugène Ionesco's play The New Tenant (1955).
-
Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Washington, D.C.Video clips from Winsor McCay's Gertie on Tour (1921).
-
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Learn how Hollywood movies transitioned from silent to sound.
-
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Learn about essential elements of the novel—including mood, motivation, characterization, and style—with editor and anthologist Clifton Fadiman and actors from London's Old Vic theater company. This is a 1962 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
Transcript
Writer. Observer. Critic.
Who was Joan Didion?
Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California.
During her final year at the University of California, Berkeley, Didion won a Vogue magazine essay contest and shortly afterward accepted a job at Vogue’s New York office.
Within a few years, she was writing not only for Vogue but also for Mademoiselle and National Review—publications where she first honed her sharp personal prose.
In 1963 Joan Didion published her first novel, Run River, the story of a disintegrating California family.
Run River was followed by many, many more publications, both fictional and factual: The White Album, an analysis of 1960s culture, Play It as It Lays, a novel about an actress in crisis, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, are just a few.
Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021.
She is remembered as a major voice of New Journalism—a genre combining factual reporting and immersive narrative—and as one of the strongest culture writers of the 1960s and ’70s.