John Gregory Dunne

The young Dunne developed a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. He learned how to manage it by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Priory School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was member of Tiger Inn.

They married on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. He was 31 and she 29. They moved to a remote house on the California coast; Didion worked on a novel to follow her debut Run, River, and Dunne worked on a book about the California grape pickers' strike. They wrote a joint by-lined column for the Saturday Evening Post magazine for years. Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state.

Dunne and Didion moved to Manhattan. He died there of a heart attack on December 30, 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004.

In the late 1950s, he met Joan Didion in New York City, where she was an editor at Vogue. In a 2005 interview Didion recalled, "We amused each other and I thought he was smart. He knew a lot of stuff that I didn't know, like politics and history – I had managed to go through school without learning much except a lot of poems." He invited her to travel to Connecticut one weekend in 1963 to visit his family: New England Irish Catholic, with six children. Didion said she "liked the set-up, liked being there, and liked him."

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