- Hits: 320
Joan Didion the author revered for her coolly dispassionate essays and novels such as “Play It as It Lays,” has died, her publisher confirmed to The New York Times on Wednesday. She was 87. Along with her late husband John Gregory Dunne, Didion co-wrote screenplays for the films “True Confessions,” “A Star Is Born,” “The Panic in Needle Park” and “Up Close and Personal.”
It was the 1968 essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays,” which she also adapted for a 1972 film, that secured her reputation as a sharp-eyed observer of the culture and people of California and beyond.
Another essay collection, 1979’s “The White Album,” assembled from her pieces in Esquire and other magazines, took on subjects that defined the era such as Charles Manson and the Doors, further cementing her place as one of the foremost chroniclers of the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s.
