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Joan Didion

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Joan Didion

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American writer (1934-2021)

OverviewAI-generated

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was an American author. Her bibliography includes 61 works, with additional entries recorded in academic databases. She was recognized in the American Academy Arts Sciences collection. Didion had one child.

Her writings have been cited in 499 other encyclopedia articles. She is associated with several recorded quotes, including “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are” and “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Her official website is joandidion.org.

Synthesized by Vinony from 19 facts across 9 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Europeana Sparql, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Wikiquote, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born
5 December 1934
Died
23 December 2021
Works
61

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
US
Active from
1934-12-05
Active to
2021-12-23

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
300
Total plays
3,513

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Joan+Didion">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Joan Didion

Quotes

  • The wind shows us how close to the edge we are
  • Writers are always selling somebody out.
  • Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
  • The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
  • Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
  • One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Works in European collections

1 object attributed to Joan Didion, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Joan Didion (/ˈdɪdiən/; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. She went on to publish essays in The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle and the history and culture of California. Play It As It Lays (1970), Didion's second novel, is considered a classic work of American fiction; Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest that the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Joan Didion” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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