John Gregory Dunne

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John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.

Early life

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 prominent heart surgeon. With several siblings, he grew up in a large, wealthy Irish Catholic family. Their maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns (1857–1940), founded the Park Street Trust Company.

The young Dunne developed a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. He learned to manage it by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Priory School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was member of Tiger Inn.

Personal life

Dunne married Didion on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. He was 31 and she 29. They contemplated filing for divorce in 1969, as Didion famously wrote in one of her essays.

Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state. Quintana died in 2005 after a series of illnesses.

Dunne was uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).

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.

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Career

Dunne began writing for Time magazine in New York City. In many ways, he praised political essayist Noel Parmentel as a mentor.

He first encountered Joan Didion in New York City, where she was an editor at Vogue in the late 1950s. "We amused each other, and I thought he was smart," Didion said in a 2005 interview. He knew a lot of stuff that I didn't know, including politics and history. I had to go through school without knowing much more than a few poems." He invited her to Connecticut for the first time in 1963 to visit his family: six children from New England. "I liked the setup, liked being there, and liked him," Didion said.

The couple married on the California coast in 1964; Didion worked on a book about the California grape pickers' strike; and Dunne worked on a comic to accompany her debut Run, River, and Dunne. They wrote a jointly bylined column in the Saturday Evening Post newspaper for years.

Dunne and Didion gained writing experience from book publishers and magazines, traveled together on journalism trips, and established a work pattern that lasted for more than 40 years. They were constantly advising, consulting, and editing collaboration. For each, critically acclaimed bestselling books were followed, including Dunne's The Studio, his nonfiction interpretation of 20th Century Fox.

They also worked on a number of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of Dunne's book of the same name. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen is a film by Robert Koch.

Dunne, a literary commentator and essayist, was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were published in two books, Quintana & Friends (1980) and Crooning (1990).

He wrote several books, among them True Confessions, loosely based on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr., Jr. He was both the author and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he led viewers through Los Angeles' cultural landscape.

Dunne and Didion later moved to Manhattan. He died as a result of a heart attack on December 30, 2003. Nothing Lost, his last book, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.

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