Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan.
In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory.
“We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in “Where I Was From” , a psychic portrait of the state.
In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St.
“She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s through her own highly idiosyncratic and personal — that is, seemingly personal — writing.
Silvers, who was the editor of The New York Review of Books, which began publishing Ms. Didion’s work in the early 1970s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009.
Her father was a finance officer with the Army, her mother a homemaker, and during World War II the family moved from one posting to the next before returning to Sacramento after the war.
In her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956, Ms. Didion submitted an early draft of a short story to Mademoiselle and won a spot as guest fiction editor for the magazine.
They also adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, taking her name from the Mexican state, which they had chanced upon while looking at a map.
Ms. Didion wrote about her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness in “The Year of Magical Thinking” , which won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and was adapted for the Broadway stage in 2007 in a one-woman production starring Vanessa Redgrave.
“Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me,” she told The Paris Review in 2006.
Their second screenplay was an adaptation of Ms. Didion’s second novel, “Play It as It Lays” , the elliptical tale of a young actress who compulsively drives the California freeways to forget her failed marriage, an abortion and her daughter’s mental illness.
With James Taylor and Carly Simon in mind for the lead roles, they rewrote “A Star Is Born” to bring it into the rock ’n’ roll era.
The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of “Miami” , another extended foray into personal journalism, which some critics began to find wearying.
Two years later, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” a documentary film produced and directed by Griffin Dunne, the son of her brother-in-law, the journalist Dominick Dunne was shown on Netflix.
Several of these essays were included in the collections “After Henry” , which focused on the administrations of George Bush and Bill Clinton.
The voice remained the same: tough, knowing, at times cynical.