Joan Didion

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Joan Didion


Born
in Sacramento, California, The United States
December 05, 1934

Died
December 23, 2021

Website

Genre

Influences
Ernest Hemingway, George Eliot, Henry James


Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, 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. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United Stat
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Average rating: 3.95 · 653,992 ratings · 71,434 reviews · 101 distinct worksSimilar authors
The Year of Magical Thinking

3.93 avg rating — 297,060 ratings — published 2005 — 176 editions
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Play It As It Lays

3.90 avg rating — 90,005 ratings — published 1970 — 4 editions
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem

4.18 avg rating — 82,142 ratings — published 1968 — 87 editions
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The White Album

4.02 avg rating — 49,548 ratings — published 1979 — 60 editions
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Blue Nights

3.95 avg rating — 48,079 ratings — published 2011 — 8 editions
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean

3.84 avg rating — 19,893 ratings — published 2021 — 32 editions
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South and West: From a Note...

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3.68 avg rating — 15,235 ratings — published 2017 — 36 editions
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A Book of Common Prayer

3.79 avg rating — 6,510 ratings — published 1977 — 78 editions
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Where I Was From

3.86 avg rating — 6,401 ratings — published 2003 — 6 editions
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Run River

3.82 avg rating — 4,415 ratings — published 1963 — 13 editions
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More books by Joan Didion…

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Quotes by Joan Didion  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Polls

June 2022 New School Poll

 
  66 votes, 23.2%

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, 1982, 183 pages
 
  53 votes, 18.7%

 
  43 votes, 15.1%

 
  42 votes, 14.8%

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, 1902, 210 pages
 
  32 votes, 11.3%

 
  28 votes, 9.9%

Independent People by Halldór Laxness, 1934, 482 pages
 
  20 votes, 7.0%

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