American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter whose reportage and personal essays — written in a controlled, observant, diagnostic prose — made her one of the indispensable 20th-century American writers of non-fiction. Raised in Sacramento, educated at Berkeley, Didion began at Vogue in the late 1950s, moved to Los Angeles with her husband John Gregory Dunne in 1964, and over the next five decades produced a body of work that tracked California, the 1960s counterculture, Hollywood, American politics, Central America, and finally her own grief.
Her style was famously made: Didion said she typed out Hemingway sentences to learn how they worked, and the evidence is on every page. Short sentences, concrete nouns, a refusal of sentimental adjectives, a cold eye for the sentimental drift of other people's writing. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) — the title essay a report on Haight-Ashbury in 1967 — defined New Journalism's possibilities almost single-handedly and remains her most-taught book. The White Album (1979) extended the method: California, Manson, the Black Panthers, Huey Newton's apartment, her own migraines and nervous breakdown, all registered in the same cool voice.
Her later political reporting (Political Fictions, 2001) was as sharp as anything she wrote — an insider's exposure of the self-dealing of the political-journalistic class. The turn that made her most famous, though, was the late grief trilogy: The Year of Magical Thinking (2005, on her husband's sudden death), Blue Nights (2011, on her daughter's), and the posthumous journals. These books stripped the earlier style down further still, treating grief with the same clinical attention she had given political conventions, and finding that the attention did not protect against anything.