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John Gregory Dunne was born on May 25, 1932 in West Hartford, Connecticut. He grew up with five siblings, three brothers, and two sisters. His father was a well-established heart surgeon in Hartford and the family lived in a large upper-class house off Albany Ave, just across the West Hartford\/Hartford town line and within sight of the Hepburn family home (Szanton 2021).<\/p>\n
His mother\u2019s father, Dominick F. Burns, had been a successful grocer with a store on Park Street in the Frog Hollow area and had founded the Park St. Trust Co. According to Dunne\u2019s autobiography Harp<\/em>, his grandfather was considered the first millionaire of the Irish community, \u201cthe Saint of Park St.\u201d (39). An elementary school was named after him and still operates as the Burns Latino Studies Academy on Putnam Street. The school\u2019s theater is named after Griffin Dunne, John Gregory Dunne\u2019s nephew, who raised money for it (McNally).<\/p>\n The tenements of Frog Hollow when Burns first arrived constituted the Irish Ghetto from which escape was possible only through the three \u201cP\u2019s\u201d: Politics, Priesthood and Police (Harp<\/em> 36). No wonder then that John Gregory\u2019s novels, screenplays, and non-fiction articles often probed the undercurrent of law enforcement and the politics and hypocrisies of Catholic institutions.<\/p>\n The wealthy status of the Dunne\u2019s led the Irish family to encourage all the children to enroll in prep schools and private colleges. Yet the writer\u2014far less traditionally Irish Catholic than his parents, especially his mother\u2014always battled with the WASP snobbery of West Hartford, just as he fought to preserve his \u201charp\u201d Irish working class status (harp being a derogatory term for the Irish purposely reclaimed by Dunne because, as stated on Harp<\/em>‘s dust jacket, he found it “short sharp and abusive”). Parochial school, John Gregory claims, was \u201ca breeding ground of class hatred\u201d and taught him to be always suspicious of authority (Harp<\/em>\u00a049).<\/p>\n Despite its affluence, the family was not without traumatic events. Three of the\u00a0siblings, Dominick,\u00a0John\u00a0and the youngest\u00a0Stephen,\u00a0all stuttered as children. Overcoming the stuttering was instrumental for\u00a0John\u00a0and he often suggested that his turn toward writing was an effort to avoid the difficulties of speaking. In later years, the youngest brother Stephen would commit suicide and a year later John\u2019s sister Katherine would die of cancer. Dominick\u2019s daughter would be strangled to death by a boyfriend.<\/p>\n Dunne enlisted in the military after graduating from Princeton in 1945 and served two years in the army.<\/p>\n It was the Dunne family that Joan Didion claims she fell in love with on a visit to Hartford in 1964 when she decided to marry John. John quit his job writing for Time<\/em> magazine and the two set out on their own, collaborating and writing and sharing their lives, according to the documentary film \u201cThe Center Cannot Hold,\u201d created by his nephew Griffin. They moved to California in 1965 and lived in Portuguese Bend, in a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was there that John wrote his first book Delano<\/em> which documented the California Grape Pickers strikes organized and led by Delores Huerta and Cesar Chavez. When the couple, who could not have their own children, adopted an infant daughter, they moved away from the cliffs on the ocean and rented a large house in a run-down area of Hollywood.<\/p>\n In 1967, Didion wrote about the Haight Asbury \u201chippies\u201d in her nonfiction work\u00a0Slouching Toward Bethlehem<\/em>, its title, like Griffin\u2019s documentary film, taken from the famous Yeats poem \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d It was this book that launched Joan Didion into the stardom she maintained all her life and which John Gregory Dunne shared until his death in 2003. This book and many of the couple\u2019s joint pieces bent the rules for non-fiction writing in the way that Truman Capote\u2019s novel In Cold Blood <\/em>(1966)\u00a0had done. This genre of nonfiction known as New Journalism blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction, the dry facts given the power of literary image, suggestion, nuance, and symbolism so that historical events are made unfamiliar and new.<\/p>\n Though the couple was distanced from the larger Hartford family during the 1970s, Dunne\u2019s brother Dominick moved to Hollywood and worked with them on screenplays. A characterization of the siblings’ relationship may well be drawn from Dunne\u2019s 1977 novel True Confessions<\/em>: \u201cthere had always been strain between them, and fear, and envy. They were brothers. As simple as that. Cain and Abel.\u201d After collaborating on two films, The Needle in the Park<\/em> (1971), which gave Al Pacino his first starring role, and Play it as It Lays<\/em> (1972), based on Didion\u2019s novel, the two brothers disconnected.<\/p>\n Dunne and Didion became enmeshed in the Hollywood success of their screenplay for the hit film remake of A Star is Born<\/em> and Dominick, who covered crime stories for Vanity Fair<\/em> (including the Menendez brothers and the O.J. Simpson trial), went on to write several popular novels. The brothers reconciled somewhat in later years. According to Dominick, John had a love for the latest gossip, a violent temper, and anything could set him off or provoke the barbs of his Irish humor and sarcasm. In one review of Dominick\u2019s son\u2019s memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club<\/em>, James Keene recounts a story where Dunne punched Gore Vidal in the face.<\/p>\n Dunne and Didion became unhappy together in the latter 1960s and early 1970s and nearly divorced, and it was during this \u201cdark time\u201d that she wrote Play it As it Lays<\/em> and he wrote Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season<\/em>. The couple reconciled in a house on Malibu beach which was being partially renovated by the young carpenter and future actor Harrison Ford. There they grappled with Hollywood culture and came together to work on screenplays and articles. Didion\u2019s 1979 collection of essays The White Album<\/em> explored what both agreed was the meaninglessness of life and writing.<\/p>\n Dunne\u2019s five novels and numerous essays often focused on the underside of Hollywood, characters on the fringes, and his sarcasm reached into the darker side of the Catholic Church\u2019s hypocrisy. As Owen McNally wrote in the Hartford Courant<\/em>, \u201ceverywhere in \u2018Dunneland\u2019 there is a loss of innocence,\u201d there is laughter in the tragic and \u201chumor is communion, irreverence is salvation\u201d (2004). His other novels such as Nothing Lost<\/em> and Playland<\/em> followed True Confessions<\/em> with sharp satire, snappy dialog and a twinge of sociological depth, all hallmarks of the crime fiction genre.<\/p>\n In the early 1980s, Dunne and Didion returned to New York City where they had first met and where, with their weekly joint editorial column, they were dubbed by the Saturday Review<\/em>, the \u201cFirst Family of Angst.\u201d They wrote independently but edited each other\u2019s work, and he was the buffer between her and the world of notoriety and fame. He was always her companion and editor. Dunne wrote reviews and articles for countless publications including long pieces in the New York Times Review of Books<\/em> about, among other topics, the OJ Simpson trial, his friend the actress Natalie Wood, and the baseball great Jackie Robinson. It was the editor of the New York Review<\/em> who first had steered Joan Didion into her important political writing: Salvador<\/em> and Miami<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the long run, neither writer felt restricted by journalistic genres, and they openly celebrated their work together as screenwriters when the general assumption was that such work would jeopardize the creative validity of a true novelist\u00a0as had been the case\u00a0perhaps with\u00a0William Faulkner and F. Scott\u00a0Fitzgerald.\u00a0As a couple, they followed their own directions and somehow succeeded in producing a distinguished body of work over\u00a0a long period\u00a0of time.<\/p>\n Dunne\u2019s 1997 memoir Monster: Living Off the Big Screen<\/em> is a testament to the craft and truth-telling that characterized the couple\u2019s screenwriting. The book describes in particularly vitriolic fashion the making of the popular movie Up Close and Personal<\/em>, starring Michelle Pfiefer and Robert Redford. Didion and Dunne wrote 27 versions of the script that originally traced the tragic life of news anchor Jessica Savage, who died at 36, but the final commercial film wound up censoring Savage\u2019s sexuality, her lover\u2019s abuse, her attempted suicides, and her drug use. The film, in Dunne and Didion\u2019s view, was a total failure.<\/p>\n John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack on December 30, 2003 in their apartment in New York City after visiting their daughter Quintana Roo in the hospital. Joan Didion\u2019s National Book Award winning memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking<\/em>, describes his sudden death in powerful detail and explores her grieving process. Quintana died two years later and Didion documented that tragedy in Blue Nights<\/em>. Both books, elegant and powerful, reveal more aspects of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, than perhaps anything he himself ever wrote.<\/p>\n [In Progress]<\/p>\n Notes for editor:<\/p>\n John Gregory Dunne – Major Works and Biographical and Critical Sources<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Gregory Dunne: Novelist, Journalist, Essayist, Screenwriter by John Christie Early life in West Hartford John Gregory Dunne was born on May 25, 1932 in West Hartford, Connecticut. He grew up with five siblings, three brothers, and two sisters. His father was a well-established heart surgeon in Hartford and the family lived in a large … Continue reading John Gregory Dunne\u00a0(1932-2003)\u00a0<\/span> Marriage and the move to Hollywood<\/h5>\n
Collaboration\u00a0 in New York City<\/h5>\n
Death at an early age<\/h5>\n
Anthology Selections<\/h5>\n
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