The writer, who was also the author of several screenplays for the cinema, died at her home in Manhattan from Parkinson's disease, the daily reported.
A figure in the great American tradition of literary journalism, Joan Didion had divided her life between California, where she was born in Sacramento on December 5, 1934, and New York.
After an unsuccessful first novel in 1963, "Run River", she set out to document the hippie counter-culture in San Francisco in 1967 for the Saturday Evening Post.
From this dive had emerged a famous text, "Slouching towards Bethlehem", report in the first person, which had made him famous.
Returning to New York with her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, she was later introduced to political journalism, whose experiences she had gathered in a 2001 collection, "Political Fictions".
Some then saw, in his description of a "professional political class" disconnected from the daily life of voters, a premonitory warning of the Trump era.
After the deaths of her husband and daughter, she had also drawn from her grief the energy to write two autobiographical accounts, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2007) - awarded the prestigious National Book Award - and " The Blue of the Night "(2011).
© 2021 AFP