Joan Didion was born in in 1934 in Sacramento and raised in the great central plain of California, an area she often describes nostalgically in her work. As an undergraduate English major at the University of California–Berkeley, she won an essay prize sponsored by Vogue magazine. As a result, Vogue hired her, and for eight years she lived in New York City while she rose to associate features editor. She published her first novel, Run River, in 1963 and in the same year, married the writer John Gregory Dunne. In 1964 the couple returned to California, where they remained for twenty-five years. Although Didion wrote four more novels, her reputation rests on her essays collected as Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). In addition to her work as a columnist, essayist, and fiction writer, she collaborated with her husband on a number of screenplays. She has focused her trenchant powers of observation in two documentary, book-length studies: Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987). A Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which deals with the deaths of her husband and daughter, marks a return to her earlier personal essay style.
Didion's Works
Fiction
• Run, River (1963)
• Play It As It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)
Nonfiction
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006)
Drama
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)
