John Gregory Dunne | |
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| Born | (1932-05-25)May 25, 1932 Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Died | December 30, 2003(2003-12-30) (aged 71) New York City, U.S. |
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| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Years active | 1954–2003 |
| Notable works |
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| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
| Relatives | Dominick Dunne (brother) Griffin Dunne (nephew) Dominique Dunne (niece) Hannah Dunne (great-niece) |
John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American writer.[1] He began his career as a journalist forTime magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays.[2] He often collaborated with his wife,Joan Didion.[3][4]
Dunne was born inHartford, Connecticut and was a younger brother of authorDominick Dunne. He was the son of Dorothy Frances (née Burns) and Richard Edwin Dunne (1894–1946), a hospital chief of staff and heart surgeon.[5][6] 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.[7]
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 thePortsmouth Abbey School and graduated fromPrinceton University in 1954, where he was a member ofTiger Inn.[2]
Dunne started working as a journalist inNew York City forTime magazine. He credited the political essayistNoel Parmentel as a mentor in many ways.[2]
In the late 1950s, he metJoan Didion in New York City, where she was an editor atVogue. 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."[8] He invited her to travel toConnecticut one weekend in 1963 to visit his family, New England IrishCatholic, with six children. Didion said she "liked the set-up, liked being there, and liked him."[8]
After they married in 1964, the couple moved to a remote house on theCalifornia coast; Didion worked on a novel to follow her debutRun, River, and Dunne on a book about the California grape pickers' strike. They wrote a jointly bylined column for theSaturday Evening Post magazine for years.[4][8]
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'sThe Studio, his nonfiction account of20th Century Fox.[2][4]
They also collaborated on a series of screenplays, includingThe Panic in Needle Park (1971),A Star Is Born (1976), andTrue 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.[2][4]
As a literary critic and essayist, Dunne was a frequent contributor toThe New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books,Quintana & Friends (1980) andCrooning (1990).[2][4] He wrote several novels, among themTrue Confessions, based loosely on theBlack Dahlia murder, andDutch Shea, Jr. He was the writer and narrator of the 1990PBS documentaryL.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through Los Angeles's cultural landscape.[2][4]
His final novel,Nothing Lost, which wasin galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.[9]
Dunne was uncle to actorsGriffin Dunne andDominique Dunne.[3]
He married Joan Didion on January 30, 1964, atMission San Juan Bautista in California.[10] He was 31 and she 29. They contemplated filing for divorce in 1969, as Didion famously wrote in one of her essays.[11] Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after theMexican state.[8] Quintana died in 2005 at age 39 after a series of illnesses.[12]
In 1988, Dunne and Didion moved fromSouthern California toNew York City. They moved to theUpper East Side, where Didion continued to live for 33 years until her death in 2021. Dunne died in their Manhattan apartment of aheart attack on December 30, 2003.[13]
Didion wrote and publishedThe 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 theNational Book Award.[14]
