Joan Didion, Revered Author And Essayist, Dies At 87

NEW YORK CITY, NY — Joan Didion, author and essayist known for her provocative social and personal commentary in books including “The Year of Magical Thinking” and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," has died, according to multiple reports. She was 87 years old.

Didion's publisher, Penguin Random House, announced the author's death Thursday. She died from complications from Parkinson's disease, the company said.

"Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers," Penguin Random House said in a statement. "Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics."

Didion was among many "New Journalists" who emerged in the 1960s, combining a literary style with nonfiction reporting.

Tiny and frail even as a young woman — with large, sad eyes often hidden behind sunglasses and a soft, deliberate style of speaking — Didion once observed 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."

For decades, Didion dissected everything from politics to culture, from hippies to presidential campaigns. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "The White Album" and other books became essential collections of literary journalism.

Didion was equally candid about her own struggles. She was diagnosed in her 30s with multiple sclerosis and around the same time suffered a breakdown and checked into a psychiatric clinic in Santa Monica, California.

In her 70s, she reported on personal tragedy in the 2005 work, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a story formed in the aftermath of grief following the death of her husband and writing partner, John Gregory Dunne. In 2003, Dunne collapsed and died of a heart attack as their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was gravely ill in a hospital.

The bestseller won a National Book Award and became the kind of work people would instinctively reach for after losing a loved one.

Quintana died in 2005 at age 39 of acute pancreatitis. Didion wrote of her daughter’s death in the 2011 publication "Blue Nights."

"We have kind of evolved into a society where grieving is totally hidden. It doesn’t take place in our family. It takes place not at all," Didion told The Associated Press in 2005.

Born in 1934 in Sacramento, California, she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956 and moved to New York for a job at Vogue after winning a writing contest sponsored by the magazine.

Didion spent her later years in New York, but she most strongly identified with her native state of California. It was the setting for her best-known novel, the despairing "Play It As It Lays," and for many of her essays.

The Associated Press contributed reporting to this story.