The eminent journalist, author, and anthropologist of contemporary American politics and culture Joan Didion has passed away at the age of 87 at her home in Manhattan, New York. She succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. She had earned a reputation as a writer in US society. Didion first become a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of new journalism, which enabled writers to take a storyline, more individualized perspective.
Didion spent her later years in New York, but she was shaped by her native state of California, “a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it”.
Along with Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, Didion was a superstar female figure in the very male New Journalism movement. She devoted her life to writing in American society. Her life was collected in books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her sharp-eyed journey through the pledge and disintegration of California’s 60s counterculture, and The White Album, which started, in her economical, astute style, with judicious style, with, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Moreover, Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and spent her early years away from school due to her father’s Army Air Corps career, which took the family all over the country. Didion began her road early, starting her first notebook when she was five years old, despite being a nervous youngster.
Furthermore, after her death was confirmed, tributes flooded in from all corners of the political and literary worlds. Governor Gavin Newsom described Didion as “unparalleled in her ability to write about life, loss, love, and society. She was arguably California’s best living writer. Her ability to articulate the tapestry of California and the times made her an asset for her age and future generations.
