Joan Didion: podcast appearances and interviews

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist recognized as one of the pioneers of New Journalism, a movement that includes writers such as Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Her writing career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine; she subsequently published essays in various magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. During the 1960s through the late 1970s, her work engaged audiences with explorations of the counterculture of the era, Hollywood, and the history and culture of California. Her second novel, Play It As It Lays, published in 1970, has been deemed a classic of American fiction and was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. In addition to her literary work, Didion collaborated with her husband John Gregory Dunne on screenplays for films such as The Panic in Needle Park, A Star Is Born, and Up Close & Personal. Her political writing focused on rhetoric and foreign policy, particularly in Latin America, and in 1991 she authored an early mainstream media article on the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five. Didion was honored with the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005 for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about her husband's death; she also received the National Humanities Medal in 2013. Her life and work were profiled in the 2017 Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold.