Joan Didion

John Gregory Dunne was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic. Dunne was born in Hartford, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He was the son of Dorothy Frances and Richard Edwin Dunne, a hospital chief of staff and prominent heart surgeon. His Irish Catholic... family was wealthy; his maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns, founded the Park Street Trust Company. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Priory School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was member of the Tiger Inn, and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel with being his mentor in many ways. He met Joan Didion in New York in the 1950s, 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.
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