American · 1934–2021
Joan Didion wrote about California, America, and grief with a style so distinctive it became its own genre. "Play It as It Lays" captured 1960s Los Angeles anomie through a woman's breakdown. Her essays—"Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "The White Album"—defined New Journalism and influenced every subsequent essayist. "The Year of Magical Thinking," written after her husband's death, won the National Book Award. Didion died in 2021, leaving a body of work that permanently altered American prose.