Joan Didion, peerless prose stylist, dies at 87

Didion prided herself on being an outsider, more comfortable with gas station attendants than with celebrities. But she and her husband, whose brother was the author-journalist Dominick Dunne, were well placed in high society. In California, they socialized with Warren Beatty and Steven Spielberg among others and a young Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter on their house. They later lived in a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, knew all the right people and had a successful side career as screenwriters, collaborating on “The Panic in Needle Park,” a remake of “A Star Is Born” and adaptations of “Play It As It Lays” and his “True Confessions.”

Born in 1934 in Sacramento, California and descended from pioneers who had traveled with the notorious Donner Party, Didion was fascinated by books from an early age. She was encouraged to write by her mother, as a way of filling time, and was especially impressed by the prose of Ernest Hemingway, whose terse rhythms anticipated her own. She was both shy and ambitious, inclined to solitude, but also determined to express herself through writing and public speaking. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956 and moved to New York for a job at Vogue after winning a writing contest sponsored by the magazine.

Conservative in her early years, voting for Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 and contributing essays to William F. Buckley’s National Review, Didion became more liberal later on, attacking the role of religion in politics and the establishment’s “increasingly histrionic insistence” that President Clinton be removed from office for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. She was especially scathing about the quality of political reporting, mocking the “inside baseball” journalism of presidential campaigns and dismissing Bob Woodward’s best-selling books as vapid and voyeuristic, “political pornography.”