John Gregory Dunne
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John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American writer.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He began his career as a journalist for Time magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays.<ref name="NYTObit">Template:Cite news</ref> He often collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref name=":1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Early lifeEdit
Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He was the son of Dorothy Frances (née Burns) and Richard Edwin Dunne (1894–1946), a hospital chief of staff and heart surgeon.<ref name="hartford1">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="tra1s">Template:Cite news</ref> John was the fifth of six children in the family. John's maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns (1857–1940), founded the Park Street Trust Company.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
John Dunne developed a severe stutter as a child and took up writing to express himself. He learned to manage it by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Abbey School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was a member of Tiger Inn.<ref name=NYTObit />
CareerEdit
Dunne started working as a journalist in New York City for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel as a mentor in many ways.<ref name="NYTObit" />
In the late 1950s, he met Joan Didion in New York City, where she was an editor at Vogue. In a 2005 interview, Didion recalled, "We amused each other and I thought he was smart. He knew a lot of stuff that I didn't know, like politics and history. I had managed to go through school without learning much except a lot of poems."<ref name="elegy" /> He invited her to travel to Connecticut one weekend in 1963 to visit his family, New England Irish Catholic, with six children. Didion said she "liked the set-up, liked being there, and liked him."<ref name="elegy" />
After they married in 1964, the couple moved to a remote house on the California coast; Didion worked on a novel to follow her debut Run, River, and Dunne on a book about the California grape pickers' strike. They wrote a jointly bylined column for the Saturday Evening Post magazine for years.<ref name=":1" /><ref name="elegy">Template:Cite interview</ref>
Dunne and Didion gradually picked up writing work from book publishers and magazines, traveled together on journalism assignments, and established a working pattern that served for the next 40 years. They had a constant advising, consulting, and editing collaboration. Critically acclaimed bestselling books followed for each, including Dunne's The Studio, his nonfiction account of 20th Century Fox.<ref name="NYTObit" /><ref name=":1" />
They also collaborated on a series of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of Dunne's novel of the same name. He wrote a nonfiction book about Hollywood, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.<ref name="NYTObit" /><ref name=":1" />
As a literary critic and essayist, Dunne was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends (1980) and Crooning (1990).<ref name="NYTObit" /><ref name=":1" /> He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr. He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through Los Angeles's cultural landscape.<ref name="NYTObit" /><ref name=":1" />
Dunne and Didion later moved to Manhattan. He died there of a heart attack on December 30, 2003.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Personal lifeEdit
Dunne married Didion on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He was 31 and she 29. They contemplated filing for divorce in 1969, as Didion famously wrote in one of her essays.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state.<ref name="elegy" /> Quintana died in 2005 at age 39 after a series of illnesses.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Dunne was uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).<ref name=":0" />
Didion wrote and published The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter was seriously ill. It won critical acclaim and the National Book Award.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
BooksEdit
FictionEdit
- True Confessions (1977) Template:ISBN
- Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982) Template:ISBN
- The Red White and Blue (1987) Template:ISBN
- Playland (1994) Template:ISBN
- Nothing Lost (2004) Template:ISBN
Non-fictionEdit
- Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike (1967) Template:ISBN
- The Studio (1969) Template:ISBN
- Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974) Template:ISBN
- Quintana and Friends (1978) Template:ISBN
- Harp (1989) Template:ISBN
- Crooning: A Collection (1990) Template:ISBN
- Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (1997) Template:ISBN
- Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2005) Template:ISBN
ScreenplaysEdit
- The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
- Play It as It Lays (1972)
- A Star Is Born (1976)
- True Confessions (1981)
- Up Close & Personal (1996)