Joan Didion, the sharp-eyed and influential journalist, essayist and novelist who chronicled the social upheavals of the 1960s, the cultural landscape of California and the inner struggles of grief, died Thursday at her home in New York.
She was 87.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement from Penguin Random House.
“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 honors and are considered modern classics,” Penguin Random House said in a statement.
She rose to prominence in the 1960s as one of the pioneers of “New Journalism,” marrying traditional reporting techniques to literary flair and first-person experience. She cultivated a devoted following with cool, unsparing explorations of American politics, Hollywood, the counterculture and the contradictions of the Golden State.
Didion’s best-known works include “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968), a collection of essays about the turbulence of the late 1960s, and “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) an account of the grief that followed the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
She was a frail woman, even in her youth, but she used her size to her advantage, saying: “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”
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Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
