Joan Didion

Didion grew up in Sacramento among fifth-generation California pioneer stock, and won a Vogue essay contest that took her to New York and a job at the magazine straight out of Berkeley. She married the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the two spent decades as a Hollywood screenwriting team while each pursued a separate career in prose.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her 1968 essay collection, fixed her voice: flat, forensic, obsessed with the seams showing in American self-mythology, a register she carried into Play It as It Lays and the novels that followed. She and Dunne settled in Los Angeles and adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo.

Dunne's sudden death in 2003, followed by Quintana's death two years later, produced The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of grief that became her most read book. She died in Manhattan in 2021.