Celebrated American writer and journalist Joan Didion passes away at 87

Literary icon Joan Didion passed away today from Parkinson's disease at the age of 87.

She died at her Manhatten home, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, her publisher.

Didion first came into prominence for her writing documenting counter-culture in the '60s and 70s and was a standout female figure of the 'New Journalism' movement alongside other acclaimed journalists such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Her books, such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, are documents of this style which Wolfe described in 1972 as "a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved."

She was also one of the first mainstream American journalists to write an article suggesting that the Central Park 5 were wrongly convicted.

In later years, Didion was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize award for her novel The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the unexpected death of her husband and frequent collaborator, John Gregory Dunne.

They worked together on several screenplays including the 1976 film A Star is Born.