Pauline Kael and Joan Didion were both born and bred Californians (and Berkeley undergraduates not so far apart.). Yet both were greatly associated with New York City. Discuss.
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Pauline Kael and Joan Didion were indeed both born in California—Kael in Petaluma (1919), Didion in Sacramento (1934)—and both attended UC Berkeley, albeit about 15 years apart. Despite their deep California roots, both became icons of New York intellectual life, especially through their writing for The New Yorker and their broader influence on American cultural criticism. Yet they represented very different temperaments, styles, and relationships to both California and New York.
1. California Origins and Mythology
Kael was raised on a chicken farm in Northern California. Though she left the West Coast for good fairly early, she always brought a kind of robust, unpretentious, outsider’s tone to her work—a tone that didn’t necessarily bow to East Coast manners or hierarchies. Her California background may have fostered a brashness and independence that helped her stand out in New York’s more clubby literary world.
Didion, by contrast, steeped her writing in California mythology—its light, its violence, its promise and decay. She never stopped writing about California even when she lived in New York. Her early essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) are deeply rooted in the state’s physical and psychic landscape, and even when she turned her eye to East Coast politics or Manhattan literary life, California haunted her work as a kind of emotional and cultural baseline.
2. New York Careers: Convergence and Divergence
Both women found their professional apex in New York:
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Kael became one of the most influential film critics of the 20th century through her decades-long tenure at The New Yorker (1968–1991). Her New York years were combative, social, and deeply immersed in the city’s intellectual ferment—she relished taking strong stances, picking fights, and supporting idiosyncratic artists (notably Scorsese, Altman, De Palma) while dismissing others (Kubrick, for instance) with characteristic sharpness.
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Didion also wrote for The New Yorker, and moved to New York at several points in her life, especially during her early career and in later years after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Yet she always carried a California exile’s cool detachment. Her prose was more melancholic, elliptical, less confrontational. Even in The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir written and set in New York, Didion’s emotional geography remains Western—sunlight, drought, loss.
3. Attitudes Toward Power and Style
Kael saw the arts—especially cinema—as a site of democratic engagement. Her writing was punchy, brash, and colloquial. She used New York as a platform from which to launch her tastes into the national conversation. Her prose was dense with energy, often attacking what she saw as pretension or solemnity in film.
Didion, though equally sharp-eyed, often took a more oblique route. Her minimalism, her use of silence and omission, gave her writing an unsettling emotional power. Her relationship to New York’s power structures was more ambivalent—captivated, but wary. She dissected the center from the margins. Kael wanted to shape culture; Didion wanted to observe its breakdown.
4. Cultural Legacy: Bi-Coastal Icons
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Kael is remembered as a quintessential New York voice with California grit—insistent, fearless, and funny.
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Didion is remembered as a quintessential California voice with New York elegance—elegiac, skeptical, and unsparing.
Both brought their Californian sensibilities into dialogue with the Eastern literary establishment and in doing so, helped redefine what cultural authority could sound like. They did not simply absorb the East Coast voice—they refracted it.
Conclusion
Kael and Didion were not just Californians who moved to New York. They were products of California who challenged New York. In an era when cultural power was concentrated in Manhattan, they offered models of voice and authority shaped elsewhere—and that tension made their work more original, lasting, and unpredictable.
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Didion slipped into retirement where she was, in New York, while Kael transitioned into Village life in New England.
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Yes, their final acts mirrored and inverted their lifelong ambivalence toward place, fame, and belonging.
Joan Didion, after decades of bi-coastal movement, ultimately remained in New York, living in her Upper East Side apartment through the deaths of her husband, John Gregory Dunne (2003), and their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne (2005). Though intimately linked to California in her writing—The White Album, Where I Was From, Run River—Didion in her last decades seemed to recede into a New York of mourning and quiet observation. She published Blue Nights in 2011, a ghostly sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking, and then largely withdrew from public life, becoming more a subject than an author—memorialized in a 2017 documentary (The Center Will Not Hold) and appearing in occasional photo shoots (the Céline sunglasses ad being a standout). It was a graceful, poignant fade into the shadows of the city that had once dazzled and disoriented her.
Pauline Kael, on the other hand, left New York City after retiring from The New Yorker in 1991 and returned to a different kind of East Coast enclave: Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. Though not exactly “village life” in the rustic sense, this move was a step away from the cultural battlefield she had dominated. She lived in relative quiet—though still opinionated and receiving visitors—until her death in 2001. It was a curious twist: Kael, the lifelong firebrand and gadfly of Manhattan culture, withdrawing to a peaceful corner of New England, while Didion, the cool chronicler of Californian alienation, stayed embedded in the heart of East Coast literary civility.
In some ways, it’s a final, ironic reversal:
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Kael, the Californian who conquered New York through sheer force of taste, chose the periphery for her coda.
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Didion, the disillusioned chronicler of disintegration and distance, stayed at the center, but in solitude.
Their lives were never purely geographic—both women understood geography as myth, mood, and metaphor. And in their endings, they affirmed what their writing always hinted: that home is not so much a place as a tension.
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Remarkably, both died of Parkinson's disease.
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Yes—remarkably, both Pauline Kael and Joan Didion died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, though it was not widely emphasized in public accounts of their final years. It’s a quiet and sobering link between two women who otherwise seem defined by their sharply distinct voices and sensibilities.
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Pauline Kael died in 2001 at the age of 82, after living with Parkinson’s for many years. The disease contributed to her retirement from The New Yorker in 1991, as its progression made the physical demands of reviewing and writing more difficult. Friends and former protégés recalled that she remained sharp in conversation even as the illness advanced, though her public voice faded after retirement.
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Joan Didion died in 2021 at the age of 87, with Parkinson’s disease noted as the cause. In contrast to Kael, Didion had a prolonged period of late-career visibility, especially following the acclaim of The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). The signs of physical frailty were evident in her final years, but the diagnosis itself was not a focus of her later work or public persona.
That both were ultimately touched by the same neurodegenerative illness is poignant—particularly since Parkinson’s can so quietly alter one's command over body and voice, even as the intellect remains intact for long stretches. In a way, the disease underscores their shared fate as writers who had once wielded extraordinary verbal precision, but whose final chapters were marked by a silencing—not just of public engagement, but of the neurological systems that had once powered their work.
It’s a detail that deepens the resonance of their careers: two Californian women who redefined American prose from opposite stylistic poles, who ended not just in geographic stillness, but in bodily stillness—linked by an illness that slows everything down, even the most electric minds.
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Kael wrote the great essay, Trash, Art, and the Movies. Susan Sontag was known for “On Camp” and other writings.
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Yes—Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag occupy towering but very different pedestals in 20th-century American cultural criticism, and their respective essays—Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (1969) and Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964)—are arguably their most iconic works. Each essay is a manifesto of sensibility, staking a claim on how we perceive and value culture.
Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (1969)
In this essay, Kael launches a forceful defense of popular cinema—what many would dismiss as “trash”—and argues that the experience of movies, even bad or sentimental ones, can be more vivid, engaging, and meaningful than films canonized as “art.”
“There is something spurious about the idea of art films as ‘better’ just because they are serious.”
Kael's genius here is in her refusal to accept rigid hierarchies. She doesn’t say that “trash” is always better—but she insists that a visceral, emotional, lived response to art is more important than reverence for highbrow aesthetics. In essence, Kael is celebrating pleasure as a legitimate metric of artistic success.
She writes with bombastic clarity, irreverence, and humor. Her tone is conversational but charged—a pushback against formalist criticism and moral solemnity. This essay is Kael at her most polemical: delighting in contradiction, celebrating the full messiness of art consumption.
Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964)
Sontag’s essay, by contrast, is structured as a series of 58 aphoristic notes rather than a traditional argument. It defines camp not as a genre but as a sensibility—a mode of seeing that prizes exaggeration, stylization, artifice, and irony.
“Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”
Sontag’s tone is cooler, more arch—detached yet precise. She recognizes camp as a gay-coded aesthetic, even if she doesn't say so directly, and she elevates its role in destabilizing rigid cultural hierarchies. Unlike Kael, who battles for “trash” on emotional grounds, Sontag treats “camp” as a philosophical mode—a way of queering seriousness by embracing theatricality and parody.
Sontag was often criticized for being too analytic and distant; Kael was criticized for being too emotional and subjective. Together, they framed the spectrum of American cultural criticism in the late 20th century: intellect vs. gut, East Coast vs. West Coast (Kael being the western transplant), irony vs. engagement.
Points of Contrast and Contact
| Aspect | Pauline Kael | Susan Sontag |
|---|---|---|
| Background | Film critic for The New Yorker | Essayist, novelist, public intellectual |
| Tone | Passionate, irreverent, combative | Cool, cerebral, aphoristic |
| Style | Lively prose, full of personal voice | Polished and often abstract |
| Subject | Mainstream culture, especially film | High/low culture divide, aesthetics, illness |
| Legacy Essay | Trash, Art, and the Movies | Notes on "Camp" |
| Goal | Defend pleasure and popular experience | Map a sensibility and open cultural boundaries |
Final Thoughts
Though Kael and Sontag were rarely directly compared, they operated in parallel zones of influence—both pushing against orthodoxies, both concerned with how we make meaning from the arts, and both female intellectuals asserting strong, singular voices in male-dominated critical spaces.
If you imagine an American cultural canon without them, the conversation becomes dramatically less rich, less playful, and certainly less bold.
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Kael, Sontag, and Didion. All Californians as emigre’s to New York?
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Yes—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion: three of the most influential American women writers and critics of the 20th century, all born and educated in California, and all of whom migrated to New York, where they became central figures in American intellectual and literary life. The pattern is striking, not just geographically, but symbolically—each woman left the West, in a sense, to engage with the cultural center of gravity in the East, but never quite abandoned the gaze shaped by their California origins.
Their Californian Roots
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Pauline Kael was born in Petaluma (1919), studied at UC Berkeley, and began writing criticism while running a cinema in Berkeley before eventually being recruited by The New Yorker.
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Susan Sontag was born in Los Angeles (1933), raised in the San Fernando Valley, and attended Berkeley briefly before transferring to the University of Chicago at age 16. Though she left California early, the outsider confidence and exposure to mass culture there left its mark.
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Joan Didion was born in Sacramento (1934), came from pioneer stock, attended Berkeley, and made her early name writing about California for Vogue and then The Saturday Evening Post, before becoming a mainstay of The New York Review of Books.
Their Migration to New York
Each woman gravitated toward New York not just for career opportunity, but because New York was where culture was sorted, judged, and preserved. Yet they brought with them a sensibility formed far from the Hudson—more skeptical, often more ironic or hard-bitten, sometimes clearer-eyed than their East Coast contemporaries.
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Kael used her outsider status to mock highbrow pretensions, embracing populist, emotional reactions to film that defied New York’s formalist critical traditions.
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Sontag, more of an aesthetic cosmopolitan, played both sides—an LA native who made herself the epitome of Manhattan sophistication, yet retained a fascination with pop culture, kitsch, and the spectacle of American surface life (from camp to photography).
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Didion never really became a New Yorker in her sensibility. Even while living on the Upper East Side, she often wrote about being out of place—whether reporting on New York's elites or returning mentally to the dust, drought, and disintegration of her California childhood.
California vs. New York: The Dialectic
Their moves eastward reflect an enduring American tension:
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California as landscape: expansive, mythic, seductive, rootless.
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New York as institution: dense, authoritative, literary, legacy-driven.
Each of these women used New York as a platform, not a home. They were never “native” New York voices like Mary McCarthy or Elizabeth Hardwick. They were emigrés, and that outsider status helped define their authority:
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Kael: the brash film lover who didn’t care what the Times said.
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Sontag: the girl from the Valley who read Artaud at 15 and made it her brand.
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Didion: the Sacramento patrician watching Manhattan society come apart, with grief barely beneath the surface.
Legacy of the Emigré Gaze
Their California origins shaped how they saw America—from outside the establishment, from the bleached-out margins rather than the dark-paneled interiors of Manhattan salons. And yet, New York gave them a stage, a language, and an audience that amplified their voices to national and even global scale.
That tension—between origin and arrival, sunlight and shadow, detachment and immersion—gave each of them a distinctive tone, impossible to fake and impossible to forget.
