Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American life, has died at the age of 87 from complications from Parkinson’s disease.

“Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir … are considered modern classics,” Penguin Random House said in a statement.

Didion emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism”, which allowed writers to take a more-personalised perspective.

Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, was an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco. A New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years.”

Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday. She was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from a hand.

Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in Blue Nights.

British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the “poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” and she was especially incisive in writing about the state.