Joan Didion began her writing career in 1956 in the New York office of Vogue fashion magazine.

She was 22 years old and had won a magazine competition in her final year of college at Berkeley University in California.

She later said that the first prize was a trip to Paris, but that she had chosen the second, an internship in the editorial office.

For American writers in the 1950s, Paris was still the Mecca of the aesthetic avant-garde, the preferred place of exile for intellectuals who believed they could not endure the vulgarity and pennilessness of American society.

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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In retrospect, Didion seems to have known from the start that America was their subject. Henry James was one of her great role models, but she no longer saw the need to spend as much time in the Old World as possible for the sake of education. She did not avoid vulgarity and penniless as the final figure of the disappointed hopes of the New World; many of the essays that made her famous are pieces of the jigsaw pathology of bad taste that she put together in the interests of studying American democracy.

At Vogue - despite the French name and French dominance in the fashion world, the magazine is an American foundation - the young employee from California was initially employed with the production of captions and advertising texts.

She also continued to specialize in brevity, short texts and short sentences as a freelance writer.

Their tendency to fill entire paragraphs with half sentences in reports, even from very talkative milieus, called parodists on the scene.

In 2006, Everyman's Library published a volume that reprinted the contents of their first seven books in the non-fictional genre.

All of the texts originally appeared in magazines and newspapers, that is, they were suggested by the editorial staff.

Two worlds in which she moved

The first non-fiction book that she wrote without such a commission was her greatest success and made her a famous author even beyond the borders of America. “The Year of Magical Thinking” from 2005 contains her reflections on her grief for her husband John Gregory Dunne, who died of a heart attack after four decades of professional partnership while their daughter was in the hospital in a coma. Countless readers were touched by what Didion revealed about the rituals of an absurd superstitious hope with which she tried in vain to undo death: if she only kept her husband's shoes, he would come back. But already in the decision to react to the shock caused by the unprepared loss with rituals, i.e. recurring exercises,got through the professional routine of the author. She had learned to live with deadlines, which are called “deadlines” in English-language publications.

The couple met in New York and moved to California, Didion's home state, in 1964.

Sacramento, the state capital, was her native city;

her father was an officer.

Even the essay with which she won her chance at Vogue had a local subject: the architect William Wilson Wurster had built several buildings for her alma mater Berkeley and, as a student of the German urban planner Martin Wagner, shaped post-war California housing construction.

The circles of hell of the suburbs and the artificial paradises of Hollywood were two worlds in which the essayist and reporter Didion moved.

She and her husband wrote several screenplays for movies, including "A Star Is Born" from 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.

Something American

The novelist Didion, who presented five attempts in this supposed supreme discipline of the book market, began with autobiographical psychological thrillers and developed, so to speak, in the opposite direction to American literary history: The later novels are side pieces of her political essay writing, casual work of detective realism. In Germany, the inclusion of Didion's books was initially hampered by clumsy translations. That changed when the later book award winner Antje Ravik Strubel translated “The Year of Magical Thinking” in 2006. Hopefully she will also take on the last book published during the author's lifetime, "Let Me Tell You What I Mean," a collection of early articles that appeared earlier this year.

The essayist's style has always been felt to be distinctive, but it has undergone a radical change. Didion's first collection of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” from 1968, is a classic of “New Journalism”, the school of reportage, in which the author pushes himself into the events reported. This manner of Didion's was rated by skeptical critics as a symptom of American narcissism, which was a major subject of their social studies. In her later works, which appeared mainly in the New York Review of Books, other critics (and perhaps some of them too) missed a personal opinion because Didion consistently opened up the world of American politics through the media, i.e. as a self-referential system of Kind, for which there is now the term echo chamber.

The sharpness of the criticism of this author, who was never at a loss for sharpness, also indicated that she embodied something original American.

President Obama's awarding of the National Humanities Medal and a Netflix documentary made by her nephew Griffin Dunne confirmed her status as a national writer.

Joan Didion died on December 23rd in New York at the age of 87.