Background

John Gregory Dunne was born on May 25, 1932, in Hartford, Connecticut, United States. He was one of six children of Richard E. Dunne, a surgeon, and Dorothy Burns Dunne. On his mother's side, Dunne was a grandson of Dominick Francis Burns, who emigrated to the United States from Ireland in the 19th century, when he was only 10 years old.

Education

His mother wanted John to be a businessman and in preparation for that, his family sent him to the Portsmouth Priory School (present-day Portsmouth Abbey School), a Rhode Island institution run by the Benedictines.

He did well enough there to gain admission to Princeton, from which he earned his bachelor's degree in 1954. Soon after graduation, he volunteered for the Army before he was drafted, and underwent basic training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where he did not distinguish himself. He lost his rifle, a mistake he called ''the military equivalent of a mortal sin,'' and he failed to qualify on the firing range with whatever weapon they gave him to replace the one he had lost.

After his discharge, he dismayed his mother by choosing not to attend a business school and instead went to New York City.

Career

John Gregory Dunne found a job at a New York City advertising agency. This led to a position with Time magazine, where he discovered a love for journalism but decided he did not want to do it the way most journalists did. In 1967, using Los Angeles as their base, they began to write a column called Points West for The Saturday Evening Post when the venerable magazine was in its final days.

In 1971, Dunne and Didion attracted considerable critical attention when they collaborated on the screenplay for Panic in Needle Park, based on James Mill's nonfiction book, which was co-produced by Dominick. The movie received positive reviews, but Dunne said he thought of it as ''Romeo and Juliet on junk.''

By this time, Dunne's wife had already made a name for herself as an author, while he was still struggling, although Dunne did draw attention for his 1969 nonfiction book about Hollywood, The Studio. It was in Hollywood that Dunne earned his much of his bread and butter; he wrote the screenplay version of Didion's Play It As It Lays (1972) and was a collaborating scriptwriter for the 1976 blockbuster A Star Is Born.

The mid-1970s also saw the release of Dunne's first novels, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), which draws heavily on his Irish-American heritage. In 1977, Dunne wrote True Confessions, whose plot which he had started to think about when he was in the midst of writing Vegas. His interest in this project had developed after he read about an unsolved murder of 1947, which was frequently referred to as the Black Dahlia murder case. The case centered on a prostitute whose body, cut in half, was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. He later adapted into a 1981 screenplay.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Dunne continued to prove his versatility as a writer, making it difficult to categorize him. His works included the novels The Red, White and Blue (1987), and Playland (1994), the screenplays Broken Trust (1995) and Up Close and Personal (1996), the semiautobiographical Harp (1989), and a collection of essays titled Crooning (1990).

He wrote numerous long essays for prominent publications and in 1990 broke into television with his adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway story "Hills Like White Elephants" for HBO.

At the same time, Dunne continued to pursue a freelance journalism career, writing for such periodicals as the New York Review of Books. More recently, he returned to one of his favorite subjects, Hollywood, in his penultimate book, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (1997). Before his death, Dunne had completed another novel, which was published in 2004.

Achievements

• John Gregory Dunne was a renowned screenwriter and best-selling novelist who wrote about low and high life with a satiric and scathing pen. He has been listed as a notable Author by Marquis Who's Who.
  
  John Dunne and Joan Didion were probably America's best-known writing couple, and were anointed as the First Family of Angst by The Saturday Review in 1982 for their unflinching explorations of the national soul, or often, the glaring lack of one. Though they wrote their books separately, they teamed up to write screenplays that more than paid the way for their highly personalized literary forays.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Harp

    (In Harp, John Gregory Dunne brings home his celebrated gi...)

    1989
  • The Red White and Blue

    (A brilliantly panoramic novel spanning a quarter-century ...)

    1987
  • Playland

    (A critically acclaimed best-seller set in the glamorous, ...)

    1994
  • Crooning: A Collection

    (A collection of essays by the popular novelist address su...)

    1990
  • Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike

    (In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farmwork...)

    1967
  • Quintana & Friends

    (Quintana & Friends gather thirty-three brilliant essays w...)

    1978
  • Dutch Shea, Jr.

    (In John Gregory Dunne's celebrated third novel, Los Angel...)

    1982
  • Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne

    (No writer captured the tragic absurdity of late-twentieth...)

    2006
  • The Studio

    (In 1967, John Gregory Dunne asked for unlimited access to...)

    1969
  • Monster: Living Off the Big Screen

    (In Hollywood, screenwriters are a curse to be borne, and ...)

    1997
  • True Confessions: A Novel

    (In 1940s Los Angeles, an unidentified murder victim is fo...)

    1977
  • Nothing Lost

    (A grisly racial murder in what news commentators insist o...)

    2004
  • Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season 1974

Religion

Dunne, whose grappling with his own Irish Catholic background yielded searing literary glimpses into the sometimes-tormented experience of Irish Americans, had often joked in interviews that he would have a priest at his deathbed despite his own oft-expressed disaffection with religion.

Views

John Dunne said he did not believe that writers ought to talk very much about writing and he did not believe that much needed to be said about them after they were dead.

Personality

As a boy, Dunne stuttered, and so he found it reassuring to write whatever it was he had to say in order to give a better account of himself. The more he wrote, the better he got at capturing the speech patterns of others on paper.

Initially, young John was ashamed of being an Irish-American. He found the Irish in this country a parochial lot. But as he matured and tried to define himself, he found he was drawn to Frog Hollow, which, he said, gave him a strong sense of who he was.

Interests

• Writers

  Charles Dickens

Connections

It was in New York that Dunne met and married Joan Didion. They had a daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

Father:

Richard Edwin Dunne

1894-1946

Mother:

Dorothy Frances (Burns) Dunne

1898-1974

Brother:

Richard Edwin Dunne

1924-2008

Brother:

Dominick Dunne

1925-2009

Sister:

Harriet Anne (Dunne) Hutchinson

1927-1982

Sister:

Virginia M. (Dunne) Finley

1929-1988

Brother:

Stephen Burns Dunne

1936-1980

Wife:

Joan Didion ​

Daughter:

Quintana Roo Dunne

1966-2005

Grandfather:

Dominick Francis Burns

Friend:

Natalie Wood

References

• The Year of Magical Thinking
  2005