New York, New York - Renowned writer Joan Didion, who emerged as a distinctive voice in the New Journalism of the 1960s to launch a decades-long and lauded career as an author, essayist, and screenwriter, died Thursday at her Manhattan home.

The cause of her death was Parkinson’s disease, according to her publisher. She was 87.

Didion, born in California, was one of the leading lights in the changing of the literary guard that saw the emergence of writers Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Norman Mailer during the turbulent decade of the '60s.

Didion quickly became a well-known and highly-acclaimed writer, earning kudos for her elegant prose and acute social observations.

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Her skills were on full display in a pair of acclaimed collections of essays: Slouching Toward Bethlehem in 1968 and The White Album in 1979. Topics ran the gamut from Haight-Ashbury hippies in her home state, to reclusive magnate Howard Hughes, to Los Angeles rock band The Doors.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem remains one of the most resonant books of the 1960s.

"Joan Didion was a legend," said journalist and former California first lady Maria Shriver in a tweet. "She wrote her mind and heart out, & we all benefited. As a journalist, a writer, a woman, a Californian — she was a tremendous influence on me in every respect."

Didion received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013 and a volume of her unreleased essays was published earlier this year.

Didion’s nonfiction book, The Year of Magical Thinking, earned the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction for her account of a turbulent stretch where her daughter became gravely ill and her husband/collaborator John Gregory Dunne died from a heart attack. Didion later adapted the tale into a 2007 Broadway production starring Vanessa Redgrave.

Didion teamed with Dunne as a screenwriting collaborator, working on films like Panic in Needle Park starring Al Pacino, a remake of A Star is Born starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand, and Up Close and Personal with Robert Redford.

The author focused on political writing later in life. A documentary of her life, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, was produced and directed by Griffin Dunne, the son of her brother-in-law, and released in 2017.