Joan Didion Summary

Didion, Joan (1934—) Joan Didion has proven herself one of the most acute observers of and commentators on American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her widely anthologized ess... Read more

Biography Essay"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." These lines and the William Butler Yeats poem from which they come hold a special fascination for J... Read more

Joan Didion was born on 5 December 1934 to Frank Reese and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion, a family whose roots in California's Central Valley go back five generations. She was raised in Sacramento as an Epi... Read more

Joan Didion told an interviewer in 1992 that she "started out thinking things were pretty coherent. Then I was surprised when they weren't. I decided I better tell people." Didion tells stories of dis... Read more

Critical Essay by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally e... Read more

Critical Essay by Juan E. Corradi In places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate it in some favorite sequence of meaning... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas R. Edwards Joan Didion is one of those writers—Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Gore Vidal are others—who are so good at the higher journalism that their statu... Read more