Joan Didion

Published on Dec 17, 2016

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Joan Didion

Early Years

  • Born December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California
  • Father was an officer in the Army Air Corps and lived on military bases in Colorado and Michigan
  • Family settled in California, where Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956

Early Career

  • Worked for eight years at Vogue
  • Became associate features editor and wrote book and film reviews for National Review and Mademoiselle.
  • Moved back to California to freelance
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Essays

  • Most celebrated writing has been in the form of essays
  • 1968: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, A collection of essays from American Scholar, California Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post.
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • "My only advantage as a reporter is that 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. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

Books

  • 1979: The White Album, which is named for the legendary Beatles album
  • Didion said the album epitomized the 1960s for her.
  • In the book, she recalled the months she spent in a psychiatric facility in Santa Monica.
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Books

  • 1983: Salvador chronicled personal observations of a grueling visit she took with her husband to El Salvador.
  • 1987: Miami explored the intricacies of a city whose population, by the late 1980s, was more than fifty percent Cuban.

Books

  • 2005: The Year of Magical Thinking, chronicles the year after her husband's death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was also gravely ill and later died.
  • 2007: Didion later adapted the memoir into a one-woman play, which premiered on Broadway and starred her friend Vanessa Redgrave.

Chris Harper

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