Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American journalist and writer of novels, screenplays, and autobiographical works. Didion is best known for her literary journalism and memoirs. In her novels and essays, Didion explores the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos; the overriding theme of her work is individual and social fragmentation. At the peak of Didion's career, her writing was recognized for its significance in defining and observing American subcultures for mainstream audiences. In 1968, The New York Times referred to her early work as containing "grace, sophistication, nuance, irony." In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Frank Reese and Eduene (née Jerrett) Didion. Didion recalls writing things down as early as age five, though she claims she never saw herself as a writer until after her work had been published. She read everything she could get her hands on, and even needed written permission from her mother to borrow "adult" books—biographies especially—from the library at a young age. She identified as a "shy, bookish child" who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking. Didion attended kindergarten and first grade, but because her father was in the Army Air Corps during World War II and her family was constantly relocated, she did not attend school on a regular basis. In 1943 or early 1944, her family returned to Sacramento, and her father went to Detroit to negotiate defense contracts for World War II. Didion wrote in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From that moving so often made her feel like a perpetual outsider. In 1956, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. During her senior year, she won first place in the "Prix de Paris" essay contest sponsored by Vogue, and was awarded a job as a research assistant at the magazine, having written a story on the San Francisco architect William Wilson Wurster.

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