Research Guide to American Literature

(1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Yet, her literary reputation rests
most solidly on her nonfiction, which extends from her first collection of essays,
Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), to her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking
(2005). The success of her memoir led to renewed interest in Didion’s essays, thus
prompting the republication of seven of Didion’s earlier nonfiction collections
as We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), a title taken from the first
sentence of The White Album (1979). Filled with compelling social commentary,
political critique, and reflections on her native California, these works register,
above all, a writer’s personal search for identity and self-understanding. Didion’s
particular genius has been to craft a style that captures and reflects the spare, hard
truths she has uncovered from a lifetime of unobtrusive observation of herself, her
home state, and her country.
Didion was born in Sacramento, California, in 1934. Her family traces its
ancestry in the West to Nancy Hardin Cornwall, who traveled to Oregon by
wagon train in 1846. This lineage helped give Didion entrée into exclusive social
circles, including (at fourteen years old) the Mañana Club, a sorority whose ini-
tiation took place at the California governor’s mansion during the tenure of Earl
Warren (later chief justice of the United States). The rustic California of Didion’s
childhood—the years immediately before and after World War II—serve as a
potent foil in her writing for the great social changes that occurred in that state
in the latter half of the twentieth century.
In 1956 Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley
with a degree in English and won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris contest; the
prize included a job at the magazine. Her eight-year stay in New York had an
enormous influence on her writing and personal life. Writing for Vogue taught
her “less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the
monthly grand illusion” (Winchell). She also met John Gregory Dunne, a
writer for Time magazine. They married in 1964 and moved to Southern Cali-
fornia. The two collaborated throughout their respective careers on magazine
columns in The Saturday Evening Post (1967–1969), Esquire (1976–1977), and
New West (1979–1980). They also cowrote several Hollywood films, including
Play It as It Lays (1972), based on her 1970 novel; Panic in Needle Park (1971);
A Star Is Born (1976); and True Confessions (1981), based on Dunne’s 1977
novel. Dunne’s death in 2003 inspired Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,
which won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for
the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. In 2005 she also received the Gold Medal for Belles
Lettres from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 she received
the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters, a lifetime-achievement award.
In her essays Didion reports on a wide breadth of subject matter from
early West Coast settlers, John Wayne, the Doors, and political figures such as
Ronald Reagan, the Clintons, and El Salvadorian dictators, to shopping centers,
Hawaii, Cuban exiles, and other journalists. Despite this diversity of topics, her
nonfiction exhibits several stylistic hallmarks. The essays tend to be highly read-
able and fast-moving, a blend of journalistic facts and critical opinion. Her style
shows the influence of the New Journalism that became prominent in the late

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