Ever since she first appeared on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Joan Didion has been identified as a California writer. Although her heart belongs to the provincial Sacramento of her girlhood, her best-known essays and novels are set in the contemporary Sun Belt. She has been variously described as "a fantastically brilliant writer" and an "entrepreneur of anxiety." Her admirers have compared her to T. S. Eliot and Nathanael West. However, neoconservative critic Joseph Epstein has dismissed her as a purveyor of "freeway existentialism," and one disgruntled feminist has characterized her as "a curious creature, whose sense of literature and life is common, disappointingly conventional, and always problematical." James Dickey has called her "the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today."

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, on 5 December 1934, the daughter of Frank Reese and Eduene Jerrett Didion. As Katherine Usher Henderson points out...