Writer Joan Didion, chronicler of contemporary American society, dies at 87
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Joan Didion's essays, memoirs and screenplays chronicled modern society.(AP: Kathy Willens)
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Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American society, has died at the age of 87.
Key points:
Didion's publisher said her cause of death was complications from Parkinson's disease
Her essays, memoirs and screenplays chronicled modern society
The Los Angeles Times praised her as an "unparalleled stylist" with "piercing insights and exquisite command of language"
Didion's publisher Penguin Random House announced the author's death on Thursday (US time). She died from complications from Parkinson's disease, the company said.
"Didion was one of the country's most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honours and are considered modern classics," Penguin Random House said in a statement.
Didion first emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of "new journalism", which allowed writers to take a narrative, more-personalised perspective.
Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a title borrowed from poet William Butler Yeats, looked at the culture of her native California.
The title essay offered an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco and a New York Times review called the book "some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years".
Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday frequently was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from a hand.
She was 80 in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for its sunglasses.
Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in Blue Nights.
Didion's works were insightful, confessional and tinged with ennui and scepticism. The Los Angeles Times praised her as an "unparalleled stylist" with "piercing insights and exquisite command of language".
British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the "poet of the Great Californian Emptiness" and she was especially incisive in writing about the state.
Her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays showed Los Angeles, through the eyes of a troubled actor, to be glamorous and vapid while the 2003 essay collection Where I Was From was about the culture of the state, as well as herself and her family's long history there.
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means," Didion said in a speech at her alma mater, the University of California in Berkeley, in 1975.
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