Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a number one exponent of the Original Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The E book of Standard Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tense, terse, distinctive sigh in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She changed into 87.

The trigger changed into Parkinson’s disease, per an e mail despatched by Paul Bogaards, an govt at Knopf, Ms. Didion’s publisher.

Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, having a look feature articles in Existence magazine and The Saturday Evening Publish that explored the fraying edges of postwar American lifestyles. California, her native divulge, supplied her along with her richest cloth. In inspiring, lustrous vignettes, she captured its harshness and elegance, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and fleet vanishing previous, and its energy as a cultural laboratory.

“We believed in sleek begins,” she wrote in “Where I Was once From” (2003), a psychic portrait of the divulge. “We believed in appropriate success. We believed within the miner who scratched together one final stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”

Ms. Didion’s reporting mirrored Norman Mailer’s prescription for “enormously personalized journalism in which the personality of the narrator changed into among the capabilities within the model the reader would at final assess the trip.”

Her appeal to hassle spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. Within the title essay from “The White Album,” she integrated her own psychiatric analysis after arriving on the outpatient health heart of St. John’s Sanatorium in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

“Her talent changed into for writing about the mood of the culture,” the writer Katie Roiphe stated in an interview. “She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s via her own extremely idiosyncratic and private — that is, reputedly private — writing. She changed into completely matched to the events, along with her a little bit paranoid, a little bit hysterical, excessive-strung sensibility. It changed into an awesome conjunction of the writer with the moment.”

Ms. Didion later grew to alter into to political reporting, filing long essays for The Original York Review of Books on the civil war in El Salvador and Cuban émigré culture in Miami; they maintain been published in book make as “Salvador” and “Miami.”

“She changed into intrepid, usual and a unswerving observer,” Robert B. Silvers, who changed into the editor of The Original York Review of Books, which started publishing Ms. Didion’s work within the early 1970s, stated in an interview for this obituary in 2009. “She changed into very skeptical of the inclined glimpse and intellectual at finding the person or discipline that changed into telling about the broader characterize. She changed into a gigantic reporter.”

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

As a teen, Ms. Didion typed out chapters from Hemingway novels to tag how they worked. She changed into deeply influenced by Hemingway’s handling of discussion and silence. Joseph Conrad changed into one more formative impression.

In her junior year on the University of California, Berkeley, the place she earned a bachelor’s level in English in 1956, Ms. Didion submitted an early draft of a transient story to Mademoiselle and acquired a local as guest fiction editor for the magazine. The following year she acquired an essay contest sponsored by Vogue. Turning down a time out to Paris, the head prize, she went straight to work on the magazine, the place her prose underwent a rigorous if idiosyncratic training as she developed from writing promotional copy to changing into an affiliate capabilities editor. “In an eight-line caption every thing needed to work, every discover, every comma,” she later stated.

By the early 1960s Ms. Didion changed into writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle and Nationwide Review, in general on subject matters adore “Jealousy: Is It a Curable Illness?” On the same time, she published a effectively-got first new, “High-tail, River” (1963), about the unraveling of a Sacramento family. Even supposing now not as lean as her subsequent fiction, it launched the preoccupations that governed her later novels — violence, dread, the sickening sense that the sphere changed into spinning out of again watch over — and acquainted readers with “the Didion lady,” described by Michiko Kakutani in The Original York Cases Journal as the forlorn resident of “a clearly private desolate tract, wandering along highways or via worldwide locations to be in a local to blot out the anguish of consciousness.”

In 1964, she married John Gregory Dunne, a writer at Time with whom she had been chums for several years. They moved to California and started writing screenplays. They furthermore adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, taking her title from the Mexican divulge, which they’d chanced upon while having a maintain a study a map.

In time they became a bicoastal glamour couple, with one foot in Hollywood and the different in Manhattan’s literary salons. Mr. Dunne died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003. Two years later, Quintana Roo Dunne died of pancreatitis and septic shock at 39. Ms. Didion wrote about her husband’s loss of life and her daughter’s illness in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which acquired the 2005 Nationwide E book Award for nonfiction and changed into tailored for the Broadway stage in 2007 in a one-lady production starring Vanessa Redgrave. Ms. Didion took up the topic of her daughter’s loss of life in her 2011 memoir, “Blue Nights.”

Ms. Didion constructed a tripartite occupation dedicated to reporting, screenwriting and fiction. Reporting, she once stated, compelled her into different folks’s lives and allowed her to win the knowledge and impressions that fed her fiction. “One thing a number of discipline will effort me, so I will write a part to get out what it’s that bothers me,” she told The Paris Review in 2006. Screenwriting, in distinction, offered a diversion, adore working a crossword puzzle. She changed into unusually a hit the least bit three.

In 1970, she and her husband, after optioning a memoir about drug addicts on the Upper West Aspect of Manhattan, wrote the screenplay for “Grief in Needle Park,” a movie that gave Al Pacino his first starring role. Their 2d screenplay changed into an adaptation of Ms. Didion’s 2d new, “Play It as It Lays” (1970), the elliptical story of a young actress who compulsively drives the California freeways to forget her failed marriage, an abortion and her daughter’s psychological illness. The movie version, released in 1972, starred Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.

With their third screenplay, Ms. Didion and her husband struck gold. With James Taylor and Carly Simon in mind for the lead roles, they rewrote “A Star Is Born” to bring it into the rock ’n’ roll generation. With Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson starring, the movie became a broad field-space of enterprise success and paid its screenwriters handsomely.

The couple later collaborated on “Staunch Confessions,” the movie version of Mr. Dunne’s 1977 new, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall, and “Up Discontinuance and Internal most” (1996), a television-information drama with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In her third new, “A E book of Standard Prayer” (1977), Ms. Didion placed her heroine, the dreamy, damaged Charlotte Douglas, in a fictional Central American country torn by revolutionary politics. This broader canvas prefigured a series of long, probing articles on political subject matters, in general written for The Original York Review of Books. A time out to El Salvador, then within the throes of a civil war, yielded the fabric for the extremely impressionistic “Salvador” (1983), a scramble into the center of darkness suggestive of V.S. Naipaul.

The intricacies of Cuban-American politics maintain been the topic of “Miami” (1987), one more extended foray into private journalism, which some critics began to get wearying. In each place Ms. Didion went, it looked, she chanced on the the same keep of conditions: looming chaos, an ambiance saturated with dread and absurdities described by unwitting participants in clichéd language indicated by quotation marks.

“She continuously appears to be like to be writing preparing to a catastrophe so unpleasant that her easiest accessible response is to withdraw correct into a roughly autism,” Adam Kirsch wrote in The Original York Sun in 2006. (“I maintain a theatrical temperament,” Ms. Didion once told an interviewer.)

She left no instantaneous survivors.

In her later years, Ms. Didion deserted inclined reporting and wrote a make of cultural criticism that thinking about how the press and tv interpreted certain events, including presidential elections and the beating and rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989.

Several of these essays maintain been integrated within the collections “After Henry” (1992) and “Political Fictions” (2001), which thinking about the administrations of George Bush and Invoice Clinton. In 2006, Everyman editions published “We Present an explanation for Ourselves Experiences in Present an explanation for to Reside: Light Nonfiction.” In “South and West: From a Notebook,” published in 2017, Ms. Didion reached assist to the 1970s and retrieved her impressions of the Deep South, the place she and her husband had traveled on assignment for Existence magazine, and extra reflections on California.

The sigh remained the same: tense, lustrous, at events cynical. Despite her deceptively ragged appearance, she maintained the stance of a frontierswoman formed by the intense conditions of her native divulge. She keep aside it succinctly in “Where I Was once From”:

“You maintain been meant, whilst you maintain been a Californian, to perceive the device to lash together a corral with bark, you maintain been meant to cover spirit, abolish the rattlesnake, again transferring.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.