Essayist and novelist, Joan Didion died Thursday at the age of 87 years. She was one of the pioneers of the “New Journalism”, also called “Literary Journalism” or “Literature of Real”.
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admired by feminists like Nora Ephron and Lena Dunham, considered a major influence by Bret Easton Ellis, Jay Mcinerney and Donna Tartt for his novel Maria with and without anything (Robert Laffont, 2007), Joan Didion will have chronic History of contemporary America with lucidity and disenchantment for five decades. She died Thursday, December 23 in New York, at the age of 87, announced her publishing houses, cited by The New York Times and the Agency Associated Press.
Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934 in Sacramento (California). She is 4 years old, when her mother takes him to consult a pediatrician so that she stops screaming. This one advises to find a means of expression. Young reader, she begins to write. During the Second World War, it is offset because its father, too old for the active service in the air force, occupies administrative positions in various military bases. All these trips will have a huge influence on it. Already shy, she feels perpetually foreign.
First novel
Graduate of the University of Berkeley (San Francisco), Joan Didion wins a writing contest at age 21. As a reward, she gets, like Sylvia Plath before, a position at Vogue magazine. She publishes her first novel in 1963 (a night season, Grasset, 2014). It was in New York that she meets the writer and essistist John Gregory Dunne, who collaborates with the Time. They get married and form a couple in sight, as accomplices as Fusional. Together, they will collaborate on several scenarios: panic in Needle Park (1971), a star was born (1976), bloody confessions (1981), inspired by the “Black Dahlia”, and personal and confidential business (1996).
Both decide to move to Los Angeles in 1964. At home, they receive Janis Joplin, Roman Polanski, Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg or Brian de Palma. At the time, Joan Didion leads a yellow corvette and has a suitcase always ready to report. She collaborates with various magazines (The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Times, New York Review of Books, etc.), meeting Joan Baez or John Wayne on the filming of the four sons of Katie Elder.
In the spring of 1968, she is in the studio of Sunset Boulevard where the doors record an album. “The music of the doors affirmed that love, it was sex, and that sex was death, and that it was there that the salvation was.” Joan Didion also hangs with the fleeters and the toxicos of the neighborhood. from Haight-Ashbury. She visits the Black Huey P. Newton mission in prison, the leader of the Black Panthers, accused of killing a white policeman and goes to the San Francisco Campus State College where the police reproite the revolutionary protest.
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