{"id":1146844,"date":"2021-12-23T14:34:53","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T19:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1146844"},"modified":"2021-12-23T14:34:59","modified_gmt":"2021-12-23T19:34:59","slug":"beloved-american-writer-joan-didion-passes-away-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/beloved-american-writer-joan-didion-passes-away-at-87\/","title":{"rendered":"Beloved American Writer Joan Didion Passes Away At 87"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fbeloved-american-writer-joan-didion-passes-away-at-87%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1146844&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Joan Didion, the beloved American writer known for her brilliant short stories, essays, command of language, and cultural critiques, has passed away at age 87 after battling Parkinson\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDidion was one of the country\u2019s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics,\u201d Didion\u2019s publisher Penguin Random House said in a statement on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>Didion was the author of 19 books and was perhaps most well known for her collection of essays titled, \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy only advantage as a reporter,\u201d Didion once wrote in \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem,\u201d \u201cis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Los Angeles Times <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/obituaries\/story\/2021-12-23\/joan-didion-dead\">noted<\/a> that Didion had fans who crossed the political spectrum and generations:<\/p>\n<p><em>Readers of \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem\u201d or \u201cThe White Album,\u201d her most acclaimed nonfiction collections, \u201ccould well follow one of her paragraphs into hell,\u201d an admiring critic once noted. She deployed trenchant facts like surgical bombs, telling us, for example, that seemingly placid San Bernardino in the mid-1960s was the kind of place where it was \u201ceasy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book,\u201d where the future always looks good \u201cbecause no one remembers the past.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cNobody writes better English prose than Joan Didion,\u201d critic John Leonard once wrote. \u201cTry to rearrange one of her sentences, and you\u2019ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>President Obama called her \u201cone of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture\u201d when he presented her with the National Humanities Medal in 2012. But some critics wanted more from Didion than cool-eyed observations: They wanted to be told what it all meant. \u201cDidion,\u201d Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in The Nation in 1979, \u201cmakes it a point of honor not to struggle for meaning.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The California paper also reported that Didion\u2019s success in writing began after winning a writing contest in college:<\/p>\n<p><em>In 1956 she entered a writing competition for college seniors and won the top prize \u2014 a job writing promotional copy at Vogue magazine in New York. Fashion wasn\u2019t a personal priority \u2014 she wore tennis shoes to the office and sometimes came in with her hair still wet. Under the tutelage of a demanding editor, she learned to compress her writing by producing eight-line photo captions. \u201cEverything had to work, every word, every comma,\u201d Didion told Paris Review in 2006.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Regarding why she writes, Didion once said that, \u201cThe impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI write entirely to find out what I\u2019m thinking, what I\u2019m looking at, what I see and what it means,\u201d she said at another time. \u201cWhat I want and what I fear.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Didion was married to John Gregory Dunne in 1964 until his death in 2003. The two had one daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who passed away in 2005.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe\"><em>member<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/p>\n<p><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joan Didion, the beloved American writer known for her brilliant short stories, essays, command of language, and cultural critiques, has passed away at age 87 after battling Parkinson\u2019s disease. \u201cDidion was one of the country\u2019s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":326,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1146844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1146844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1146844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1146844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1146844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}