Joan Didion
Joan Didion ( born December 5, 1934 in Sacramento ) is an American journalist and writer. Didion writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. In collaboration with her ( deceased in 2003) husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, she wrote several screenplays. She lives in New York City.
Life
Didion was born in Sacramento ( California). In 1956, she received her degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She then worked in New York for the fashion magazine Vogue. In Didion's works are often about California, especially the sixties of the 20th century, and the changing world in which she grew up. Your descriptions of conspiracy theorists, paranoids and sociopaths ( this includes Charles Manson ) are now considered an integral part of American literature.
Didion is the author of five novels and seven non-fiction books. Your collection of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979 ) - a book that was described in a review as a tool to define California as the " world capital of Paranoia" - she made as an observer of the American political and cultural landscape known. In her distinctive reportage style she married personal experiences to social analysis. Thus it is often associated with representatives of the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in combination, although this association was never even considered by her as particularly close.
Didion's book Where I Was From (2003 ) is considered the work with the most biographical trains. It contains both collected as well as new essays, reflections and myths surrounding California. Also, it deals with the difficult relationship of the author to her birthplace and her mother. Indirectly, it also acts as a meditation on the myth of American foreign border, the rootless, consumerist lifestyle, has driven the California.
For her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, she received the 2005 National Book Award ( nonfiction ). Shortly before the publication of the book in which it processes the mourning for her late husband, died Didion's 39 -year-old adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, from a serious illness. Your despair after the loss also of their daughter describes her latest book " Blue Nights " (2011). In 2012 her the National Humanities Medal was awarded.
Works (selection)
Novels
- Play your game, dt of Margaret Eberhardt; Earthscan, Munich, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-426-00666-9.
- Like the birds of the air, German by Matthias Büttner; Earthscan, Munich, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-426-08891-6.
- Democracy, German by Karin Graf; Kiepenheuer and Malevich, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-462-01748-9.
- After the storm, German by Sabine Hedinger; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-498-01311-4.
Non-fiction
- The White Album. A Californian necromancy, dt Charlotte Franke; Kiepenheuer and Malevich, Cologne 1983. ISBN 3-462-01566-7 (formally wrong ISBN )
- Salvador, dt Charlotte Franke; Kiepenheuer and Malevich, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-462-01610-5.
- Assault in Central Park. A report, German by Eike Schönfeld; Hanser, Munich, 1991, ISBN 3-446-16357-3.
- After Henry. Reports and essays, dt by Mary Fran Gilbert, Karin and Sabine Graf Hedinger; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, ISBN 3-498-01296-7.
- The Year of Magical Thinking. German by Antje Strubel Rávic; Claassen, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-546-00405-1.
- We tell ourselves stories in order to live. German by Antje Strubel Rávic; Claassen, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-546-00409-1.
- Blue hour. German by Antje Strubel Rávic; Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-550-08886-5.