Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Joan Didion, pictured during her L.A. days, was an unabashed fan of Old Hollywood, author Alissa Wilkinson writes in her new book ...

On Thursday, it was announced that prolific writer Joan Didion had died at the age of 87. An executive at her publisher, Knopf, confirmed the author's death to TODAY in an email and said that Didion ...

It happens maybe once in a writer’s life, if it happens at all: A narrative path is established, and then without warning, it swerves in a new direction that feels like a gift. This is how Lili Anolik ...

You may have hoped over the past couple of years to open the New York Review of Books and find a good long essay by Joan Didion cutting to the quick of the Trump campaign. How would the journalist who ...

In her 1976 essay, “Why I Write,” Joan Didion described herself as the kind of writer “whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.” Had she been an ordered ...

Well, it looks as if it’s time once again for my more or less annual piece about Joan Didion. I didn’t set out to make this a yearly tradition. Way back in 2007, I wrote what I thought was a pretty ...

A new book by Alissa Wilkinson argues that the iconic writer’s imagination and signature style were profoundly shaped by Hollywood. By Charles Finch Charles Finch is the author, most recently, of ...

Reading the newly released “Notes to John,” it’s hard not to wonder how the late author Joan Didion would feel about having her personal notes from a series of painful therapy sessions converted into ...

If Joan Didion had an overarching preoccupation as a journalist and novelist, it was to find interstices where truth and myth blend into each other. In many of the essays that were collected in the ...