John Gregory Dunne
| John Gregory Dunne | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 25, 1932 Hartford, Connecticut |
| Died | December 30, 2003 (aged 71) Manhattan, New York |
| Occupation | Novelist, screenwriter, literary critic, journalist, essayist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Spouse |
Joan Didion (m. 1964–2003; his death) |
| Children | 1 |
| Relatives |
Dominick Dunne (brother) Griffin Dunne (nephew) Dominique Dunne (niece) |
John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.
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, 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 had founded the Park Street Trust Company.
The young Dunne 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.
He started working as a journalist in New York City for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel with being his mentor in many ways.
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." 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."
They married on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. He was 31 and she 29. They moved to a remote house on the California coast; Didion worked on a novel to follow her debut Run, River, and Dunne worked on a book about the California grape pickers' strike. They wrote a joint by-lined column for the Saturday Evening Post magazine for years. Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state.
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