John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.

He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel with being his mentor in many ways. He married novelist Joan Didion on January 30, 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster.

As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning.

He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr..

He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.

He died in Manhattan, New York of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.

He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist).

His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to great critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.

Books

• Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike (1967)
• The Studio
• Vegas
• True Confessions
• The Red White and Blue (1987)
• Dutch Shea, Jr.
• Monster: Living Off the Big Screen
• Playland (1994)
• Nothing Lost (2004)
• Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2005)

Screenplays

• Panic in Needle Park (1971)
• A Star Is Born (1976)
• True Confessions (1981)
• Up Close & Personal (1996)

External links

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/case-study-film-up-close-personal/, by Alan Taylor