The celebrated woman of letters Joan Didion has died at the age of 87. The author and journalist made a profound mark on 20th and 21st century literature with her writing on culture, politics and the vagaries of human life.

Her debut essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, captured the hazy disorder of a changing US in the 60s, and became a touchstone in the emerging New Journalism movement.

Didion leaves behind a legacy that includes five novels, six screenplays and 14 works of nonfiction – one of which, The Year of Magical Thinking, she turned into a play.

The former Observer literary editor Robert McCrum credited the book, which narrates the year after the death of Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, with “chang[ing] the nature of writing about bereavement”. (Their daughter, Quintana, died soon after, a cruel loss chronicled in Blue Nights.)

With cool, spare prose, Didion famously positioned herself as an onlooker – of incendiary trials, of Hollywood royalty, of her own life. An early “master of the personal essay”, her style influenced and inspired countless others – her name became a byword for good writing; her lines so-often quoted that they became cliches in themselves.

Starting her career after winning an essay competition at Vogue, she was also feted as a style icon, a luminary of California cool.

A writer’s writer, a cult figure of fashion, an intellect gazing unflinchingly at what most interested and troubled her – what do Joan Didion and her work mean to you? We’d love you to tell us in the comments.