Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels Play It as It Lays and The Book of Common Prayer proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Didion’s publisher.
Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of post-war American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory.
“We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in Where I Was From. “We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”
New York Times News Service
