One of the country's greatest writers has passed away.
E! News can confirm best-selling author Joan Didion died on Thursday, Dec. 23. She was 87.
"We are deeply saddened to report that Joan Didion died earlier this morning at her home in New York due to complications from Parkinson's disease," her team said in a statement.
Didion's long career began after she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 when she moved to New York and began working for Vogue. After starting her career as a journalist, she published her first novel in 1963 called Run River.
One year later, Didion married John Gregory Dunne and moved to California where they would become frequent literary collaborators. The pair worked together on screenplays for The Panic in Needle Park, A Star Is Born and Didion's second novel titled Play It As It Lays. They would also adopt a daughter, Quintana Roo, in 1967.
During her career, Didion received praise for her work as she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Belles Letters and Criticism. In 2007, she received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
President Barack Obama also honored the author with a National Medal of Arts and Humanities in 2013.
"Joan was a brilliant observer and listener, a wise and subtle teller of truths about our present and future," Shelley Wanger, Didion's editor at Knopf, said in a statement. "She was fierce and fearless in her reporting. Her writing is timeless and powerful, and her prose has influenced millions."
Wanger added, "She was a close and longtime friend, loved by many, including those of us who worked with her at Knopf. We will mourn her death but celebrate her life, knowing that her work will inspire generations of readers and writers to come."
In her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion addressed death and mourning when recalling the passing of her husband.
"We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves," she wrote. "As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."