Joan Didion, ‘New Journalist’ Who Explored Culture and Chaos, Dies at 87

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Ms. Didion’s publisher.

Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory.

“We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in “Where I Was From” (2003), a psychic portrait of the state. “We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”

In two early groundbreaking essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) she turned her cool, apprehensive gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, on eccentrics and searchers like Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, on the film industry in the post-studio era, and on the death-tinged music of the Doors.

Ms. Didion’s reporting reflected Norman Mailer’s prescription for “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.”

Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

It read, in part: “In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.” This description, which Ms. Didion did not contest, could describe the archetypal heroine of her novels.

“Her talent was for writing about the mood of the culture,” the writer Katie Roiphe said in an interview. “She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s through her own highly idiosyncratic and personal — that is, seemingly personal — writing. She was perfectly matched to the times, with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, high-strung sensibility. It was a perfect conjunction of the writer with the moment.”

Ms. Didion later turned to political reporting, filing long essays for The New York Review of Books on the civil war in El Salvador and Cuban émigré culture in Miami; they were published in book form as “Salvador” and “Miami.”

“She was fearless, original and a marvelous observer,” Robert B. Silvers, who was the editor of The New York Review of Books, which began publishing Ms. Didion’s work in the early 1970s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009. “She was very skeptical of the conventional view and brilliant at finding the person or situation that was telling about the broader picture. She was a great reporter.”

Joan Didion was born on Dec. 5, 1934, in Sacramento to Frank and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion. She was a fifth-generation Californian descended from settlers who left the ill-fated Donner party in 1846 and took the safer route. Her father was a finance officer with the Army, her mother a homemaker, and during World War II the family moved from one posting to the next before returning to Sacramento after the war.

As a teenager, Ms. Didion typed out chapters from Hemingway novels to see how they worked. She was deeply influenced by Hemingway’s handling of dialogue and silence. Joseph Conrad was another formative influence.

In her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956, Ms. Didion submitted an early draft of a short story to Mademoiselle and won a spot as guest fiction editor for the magazine. The following year she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue. Turning down a trip to Paris, the top prize, she went straight to work at the magazine, where her prose underwent a rigorous if idiosyncratic schooling as she advanced from writing promotional copy to becoming an associate features editor. “In an eight-line caption everything had to work, every word, every comma,” she later said.

By the early 1960s Ms. Didion was writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle and National Review, often on topics like “Jealousy: Is It a Curable Illness?” At the same time, she published a well-received first novel, “Run, River” (1963), about…