Joan Didion will read at Tulane

Legendary writer and commentator Joan Didion will read at Tulane University next month. Didion, whose collections of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album have been essential reading in university courses for two generations, is the third author in Tulane’s annual Great Writer Series. Financed by the Creative Writing Fund, the series hosted visits by Toni Morrison in 2007 and Salman Rushdie in 2008. Didion, whose career has spanned nearly half a century, has mastered multiple genres and forms, from political and cultural commentary to essays, novels and screenplays. Her bestselling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, won the National Book Award and was adapted, by the author, into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave. In 2007, she was honored with the National Book Foundation’s prestigious Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, joining the ranks of Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth and John Updike. The reading, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. April 6 at McAlister Auditorium. Doors open at 6 p.m.