Of much greater importance is the northern California setting itself. Didion's great-great-great-grandmother Nancy Hardin Cornwall came west on a wagon train in 1846, traveling most of the way with the Donner-Reed Party, only to cut north to Oregon before her companions made their way into history by eating their dead. Didion seems to carry the heritage of the frontier in her genes and with it a sense of life's contingency.
After being rejected for admission to Stanford University, Didion enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in February 1953. In her senior year she published her first short story, "Sunset," in a student literary magazine called Occident. That same year, she won Vogue's Prix de Paris Award and, with it, a job on the magazine. She lived for the next eight years in New York writing for National Review and Mademoiselle, as well as for Vogue itself. Also during those years she appeared for three consecutive nights on a television quiz show called Crosswits , published her first novel, and married the writer John Gregory Dunne. Curiously these biographical details are either ignored or mentioned only elliptically in "Goodbye to All That," the final selection in Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and her definitive essay on her years in New York.
This is a free page. This page contains 185 words. This
biography contains 10,615 words (approx. 35 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Joan Didion Access Pass.
