Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist, renowned for her novels and literary journalism. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, alongside Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.

Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her essays appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Review, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Her writing from the 1960s to the late 1970s captivated audiences by exposing the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California.

Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s focused on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she penned one of the earliest mainstream media articles suggesting that the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted.

Alongside her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion wrote screenplays including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and Up Close & Personal (1996). 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 The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir reflecting on the year following her husband's sudden death. She later adapted this memoir into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007.

In 2013, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Didion was also featured in the 2017 Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.