New York Public Library Acquires Joan Didion’s Papers - The New York Times

It was April 1957, and Joan Didion was penning to her household successful California astir her occupation arsenic a copywriter astatine Vogue. “Work is dull and tedious,” she wrote, adding, “I tin hardly hold to quit.”

Didion, 22 astatine the clip and little than a twelvemonth retired of the University of California, Berkeley, besides added her thoughts connected a publication she had precocious work that lamented the conformism of her peers. “All anyone successful this procreation wants is information and radical belonging,” she wrote, “and what volition hap to the satellite if cipher is consenting to hazard that information to summation the large things?”

Inside the envelope, Didion tucked a mag clipping showing a “little achromatic dress” she had precocious bought, which had proved “a smashing success.”

When Didion died successful 2021 astatine property 87, the quality acceptable disconnected an outpouring of tributes to a writer who fused penetrating penetration and idiosyncratic idiosyncratic voice, transcending mean literate fame to go a awesome of bicoastal chic and, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, an perfect of intellectual-conjugal partnership.

Now, the New York Public Library has acquired Didion and Dunne’s associated idiosyncratic literate archives. On Thursday, the library’s committee approved the acquisition of a trove of letters, photographs, manuscripts, household records and different worldly that traces the idiosyncratic and collaborative enactment of 1 of postwar America’s astir productive and glamorous literate couples.

The archive, which totals 240 linear feet of material, spans the full of Didion’s life, starting with her commencement successful Sacramento successful 1934 (represented by a infirmary grounds showing her mother’s thumbprint, on with the footprint of a just-born babe Joan).

There are probe files for her classical essays of the 1960s and ’70s collected successful “The White Album” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” arsenic good arsenic notes and drafts for “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights,” her memoirs astir the deaths of her hubby and daughter. The postulation besides includes drafts of the 26 screenplays that Didion and Dunne worked connected unneurotic (including “The Panic successful Needle Park” and the 1976 mentation of “A Star Is Born”), positive manuscripts and notes for Dunne’s books.

No, determination are nary of Didion’s signature sunglasses (a brace of which fetched $27,000 astatine auction last year). But determination are datebooks, homemade cookbooks, meal enactment menus and impermanent lists and different items that talk to the couple’s wide ellipse of friends successful New York, Hollywood and beyond.

The archive “very overmuch captures the value and gravitas of their careers,” said Julie Golia, the library’s subordinate manager of manuscripts, archives and uncommon books. “But it’s besides profoundly personal.”

The room — which besides holds the papers of friends similar Tom Wolfe and Jean Stein and the archive of The New York Review of Books, the couple’s longtime literate location — mightiness look the evident spot for Didion and Dunne’s papers. Still, erstwhile Golia and Declan Kiely, the library’s manager of peculiar collections and exhibitions, archetypal saw the inventory (prepared by the trader Marsha Malinowski), they were uncertain what to expect.

The manuscripts for Didion’s archetypal 9 books, from the caller “Run River” (1963) to the effort postulation “After Henry” (1992), were already astatine the University of California, Berkeley, wherever Didion placed them aft she and Dunne moved to New York City successful 1988.

But erstwhile Golia and Kiely made the archetypal of 3 visits to the retention installation wherever the remainder of Didion and Dunne’s papers were kept, they were floored by the extent and measurement of the collection, and by however idiosyncratic overmuch of the worldly was.

“Our jaws were conscionable hanging open,” Kiely said.

Their archetypal visits coincided with an auction past twelvemonth of Didion’s idiosyncratic effects, whose runaway merchantability prices — $9,000 for a acceptable of blank notebooks, $10,500 for immoderate stained pots and pans — they watched with amazement. (Kiely said that the auction, which raised a full of $1.9 cardinal for charitable causes, did not impact the terms paid for the archive, which the room is not disclosing.)

The auction, Kiely added, “tells america a batch astir the large fondness for Joan Didion — not conscionable her work, but thing astir her authorial persona that radical find some fascinating and question to emulate.”

And the archive, Golia said, reflects Didion’s cultivated consciousness of her self-presentation.

“With women writers, they are managing their ain literate talents and besides managing their images,” she said. “She was remarkably talented astatine both. She knew precisely what she was doing.”

The archive, Golia said, includes nary idiosyncratic diaries. But it does connection a affluent vein of idiosyncratic correspondence, including some household letters (more than 140 of them from her assemblage and Vogue years) and correspondence with the couple’s wide ellipse of friends and colleagues, among them Richard Avedon, Helen Gurley Brown, Michael Crichton, Nora Ephron, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Diane Keaton, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Norman Lear, Jacqueline Onassis, Philip Roth and Charles Schulz.

There’s a “touching” correspondence, Golia said, with John Wayne (about whom Didion wrote the 1965 effort “John Wayne: A Love Song”) and missives from Tennessee Williams, including a dried-flower collage inscribed to her from 1973.

Williams “was idiosyncratic who recognized Didion’s brilliance immediately, became rather enamored of and adjacent to her,” Kiely said.

U.C. Berkeley’s 7.5 linear feet of worldly whitethorn see astir of Didion’s manuscripts. But the existent spot of the acold larger postulation headed for the New York Public Library “is the portion of the iceberg that is beneath the surface: the probe materials,” Golia said. “She had unbelievably robust probe materials connected each project.”

There’s a record labeled “Haight Ashbury 1967” (the taxable of Didion’s classical effort “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”). There are notes from Didion’s jailhouse interviews with Linda Kasabian, a erstwhile follower of Charles Manson, who she wrote astir successful her effort “The White Album,” which began with the celebrated enactment “We archer ourselves stories successful bid to live.” (Didion bought the dress Kasabian wore connected her archetypal time connected the witnesser basal successful the proceedings successful the execution of the histrion Sharon Tate.)

The postulation besides includes Didion’s annotated copies of the confessions made by the 5 young men convicted successful the 1989 Central Park jogger attack, which were aboriginal revealed to beryllium false. Didion’s 1991 effort astir the lawsuit successful The New York Review of Books was prescient successful the doubts it raised. “You tin astir spot her questioning it connected the page,” Golia said of the marked-up confession.

And determination is worldly from unrealized projects, similar 1 relating to Israel and the Middle East that Didion began successful 2014 but abandoned, Golia said.

Dunne archetypal appears successful the archive astir 1964, the twelvemonth of their marriage.

There are manuscripts and different materials relating to his twelve books, including the best-selling 1977 caller “True Confessions” and “Monster: Living disconnected the Big Screen,” his 1997 relationship of the couple’s 8 years (and 27 drafts) of enactment connected the movie “Up Close and Personal.”

The archive besides includes the extended probe for his journalistic projects, similar letters helium exchanged with the convicted slayer of Brandon Teena, who Dunne wrote astir successful a 1997 New Yorker article that became the ground for the movie “Boys Don’t Cry.” (Almost each missive from the killer, Golia said, “mentions that helium was speechmaking a Didion book.”)

While determination are nary diaries, the postulation includes Didion’s datebooks, which amusement elaborate records of meetings, societal engagements and probe trips, arsenic good arsenic full weeks wherever Didion (who wrote astir her chronic migraines successful her 1968 effort “In Bed”) enactment a diagonal slash done days astatine a time, adding a azygous word: “headache.”

And those parties?

“She was some poetic and subject successful her attack to meal enactment planning,” Golia said. “It was intelligibly an experience. Everything was curated.” As for the cuisine, Golia said, “the archetypal happening I noticed was that she had a existent committedness to Chantilly cream.”

The archive includes condolence letters Didion received aft the deaths of Dunne, in 2003, and their daughter, Quintana Roo, 2 years later. And there’s besides the transcript of “The Year of Magical Thinking” that she brought connected publication tour, with passages marked with Dunne’s embossed notecards (and sometimes annotated, Golia said, with revisions for aboriginal editions).

Kiely said the papers should beryllium processed by aboriginal 2025, astatine which constituent the postulation volition beryllium unfastened without immoderate restrictions to scholars, biographers, and (like virtually each of its holdings) anyone other with a room card.