The Surging News reporter Cheng Qianqian comprehensively compiled
On December 23, the famous American writer Joan Didion died at his home in New York at the age of 87. According to Didion's publisher, Knopf Press, the cause of her death was a complication of Parkinson's disease.
Joan Didion, a famous American novelist, journalist and essayist, died at his home in New York at the age of 87. Oriental IC Infographic
Joan Didion was born in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. She entered the literary world in the 1960s and established her place in the history of contemporary American literature with her outstanding novels, screenplays, essays, and literary journalism. His major works include "Trek to Bethlehem", "The Year of Fantasy", "Blue Night" and so on.
The Year of Fantasy
Blue Night
In 2005, she won the National Book Award (nonfiction) for Year of Fantasy, and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award. In 2007, she received the National Book Foundation's Annual Medal for Writers of Outstanding Contributions to National Literature. In 2013, the U.S. government awarded Joan Didion the National Medal for the Arts and Humanities of America.
Didion's poignant coverage of California culture and the chaos of the 1960s made her a leading advocate of "new journalism," with her works Play It as It Lays and The Book of Common Prayer heralding a difficult time.
Didion rose to fame for publishing a series of crafted, thought-provoking feature articles in Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post that explored the fragile edges of postwar American life. Her hometown of California provides her with the richest creative material. In sharp and familiar vignettes, she captures its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet to unsettling settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a laboratory of culture.
Cover of Didion's work
"We believe in a new beginning," she wrote in Where I Was From (2003), a spiritual portrait of California, "and we believe in good luck." We believe the miners grabbed the last stake and hit the Konstock vein. ”
After writing two seminal collections of essays, Trek to Bethlehem and The White Album, she turned her calm and worried eyes to the hippies of Hett Ashbury, to eccentrics and seekers like Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, to the post-studio film industry, and to the door band's death-tinged music.
Trek to Bethlehem
"Her talent is to portray the mood of culture," writer Katie Roiphe said in an interview with The New York Times, "and she managed to convey the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s through her own highly special and personal writing." She fits the times perfectly. Her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, highly tense sensibility is the perfect combination of the writer and the present. ”
The novelist and non-fiction writer Francine Prose commented: "She uses a voice in the book that has never been seen before—Western, feminine, anxious." ”
Prows lists all the places and topics that Didion touched on throughout his writing career. It includes California, New York, Hawaii, El Salvador, Las Vegas, Miami, John Wayne, Patty Hurst, Vietnam, The Joggers of Central Park, The Black Panther Party, the Presidential Election, Newt Gingrich, Doris Lessing, Feminist, Hippies, Movies, Books, and News. Behind all these topics and places is her calm, alert, sad and anxious voice.
Prows said: "It's just a throbbing of anxiety. Every sentence has an electric shock-like anxiety, which is what makes you pay so close attention. I mean, you're just waiting for something to explode, and yet it's not, so you keep reading. ”
Didion later turned to political reporting, writing lengthy articles for the New York Review of Books about the Salvadoran Civil War and the culture of Cuban immigrants in Miami, which were eventually published in book form: Salvador and Miami.
"She was fearless, creative, and an amazing observer," said Robert E. Lee, editor of the New York Review of Books. In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, Robert B. Silvers said, "She was very skeptical of conventional wisdom and excelled at finding people or situations that could tell a broader picture." She was an excellent journalist. ”
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento on December 5, 1934. She is a fifth-generation descendant of California settlers, her father was a treasurer in the Army, and her mother was a housewife. During World War II, her family underwent several relocations before returning to Sacramento after the war.
As a teenager, Didion printed out chapters from Hemingway's novels for in-depth study. Hemingway's handling of dialogue and silence deeply influenced her. Joseph Conrad had a profound influence on her.
As a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, Didion submitted a first draft of a short story to Miss Magazine and was offered the position of guest fiction editor for the magazine. In 1956, Didion received a bachelor's degree in English from the school. The following year, she won a writing contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. She turned down a trip to Paris, which won the highest award, and worked directly at Vogue. There, her prose writing underwent a rigorous education. "In 8 lines of headings, everything has to work, every word, every comma." She said later.
In the early 1960s, Didion wrote for Vogue, Miss, and The National Review. At the same time, she published her first critically acclaimed novel, Run, River (1963), about the disintegration of a family in Sacramento. While not as succinct as her later novels, it introduces the focus that dominates her later novels—violence, fear, and a pathological sense of losing control of the world. Michiko Kakutani described Didion as a lonely resident in The New York Times: "Living in a wasteland that is clearly her own, wandering on a highway or crossing a country, trying to erase the pain of consciousness."
Didion and her husband in 1972 People's Vision Infographic
In 1964, she married Time magazine writer John Gregory Dunne, and the two were friends for many years. They moved to California and started writing scripts. They also adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, whose name comes from the state of Mexico and which they stumbled upon while looking at the map.
They became a charismatic couple living on the coast, stepping into Hollywood with one foot and wandering the literary salons of Manhattan with the other. In 2003, Dunn died of a heart attack at the age of 71. Soon after, 39-year-old Quintana Roo Dunn died of pancreatitis and septic shock. In The Year of Whimsy, Didion describes the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter. The work won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was adapted into a Broadway play in 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Didion's 2011 memoir, Blue Nights, features the death of his daughter.
Didion's career is divided into three parts: journalism, screenwriting, and fiction. She has said that news reports force her into someone else's life, allowing her to gather information and impressions that provide material for her novels. In a 2006 interview with the Paris Review, she said: "Something in a situation bothers me, so I write an article to find out what bothers me." In contrast, the screenwriter offers a pastime, like playing a crossword puzzle. She has had unusual success in all three areas.
In 1970, after choosing a story about drug addicts on Manhattan's Upper West Side, she wrote the screenplay for Panic In Needle Park, which gave Al Pacino his first starring role. Their second screenplay, adapted from Didion's second novel, Let It Be, tells the story of a young actress who is forced to drive a car on a California highway in order to forget her failed marriage, a miscarriage and her daughter's mental illness. The film version was released in 1972.
The third screenplay made Didion and her husband a fortune. They adapted "A Star Is Born" to bring it into the era of rock and roll. The film, starring Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, was a huge box office success and the screenwriter was handsomely paid.
The couple later collaborated on Dunn's 1977 novel True Confessions, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, and the TELEVISION news feature film Up Close and Personal (1996), starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.
In her third novel, The Book of Common Prayers, Didion places her heroine, the dreamy and sensitive Charlotte Douglas, in a fictional Mesoamerican country torn apart by revolutionary politics. The broader picture heralds a series of lengthy inquiry-based articles on political topics, often written for the New York Review of Books. El Salvador (1983) is a highly impressionistic work, a V.S. Naipaul-esque journey through darkness during the throes of the Civil War.
The intricacies of Cuban-American politics were the subject of Miami (1987), another extended attempt at personal journalism. Wherever Didion went, she seemed to find the same environment: vague chaos, an atmosphere of fear and absurdity.
In her later years, Didion abandoned traditional reporting styles and wrote in the form of cultural criticism, focusing on how the media and television interpreted certain events, including the presidential election and the beating and rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989.
Several of these essays were included in the anthology After Henry (1992) and Political Fictions (2001), focusing on the reigns of George Bush and Bill Clinton. In 2006, she published We Tell Ourselves Stories to Live: Collected Nonfiction. In her 2017 book, South and West: From a Notebook, Didion traces back to the 1970s, reclaiming her impressions of the American Southern hinterland and further reflections on California.
In her later years, her voice was still harsh and wise, and sometimes cynical. Despite her outward weakness, she has always maintained a posture of a frontier woman shaped by the extreme environmental influences of her country. She put it succinctly in "Where I Came From," "If you're a Californian, you should know how to tie up a corral with barking, you should show courage, kill a rattlesnake, and move on." ”
Editor-in-Charge: Liang Jia Photo Editor: Jin Jie
Proofreader: Ding Xiao