Diane Johnson | Author

Diane Johnson
An American-born novelist, essayist, and screenwriter

Featured Works

View all»

Previous Pause Next

PUBLISHED: Sep.01.2009

Lulu in Marrakech

The two-time Pulitzer Prize and three-time National Book Award-nominated author of Le Divorce returns with a mesmerizing novel of double standards and double agents. In Lulu in Marrakech, Diane Johnson brilliantly exposes the manners and morals of the cultural collision between Islam and the West. Lulu Sawyer arrives in Marrakech, Morocco, hoping to rekindle her romance with...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jul.01.2003

Le Divorce

Diane Johnson updates the transatlantic novel so gorgeously rendered by Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; evokes the spirit of such expatriates sojourning in Paris as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and mines the pathos of modern fiction in creating this wonderful and important novel. Isabel Walker, eerily reminiscent of James’s...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: May.01.2005

Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot’s Chapel and Other Haunts of St. Germain

The Paris Left Bank neighborhood of St. Germain is most often connected to the era from the 1940s through the 1960s, when Sartre, de Beauvoir and others gathered in its cafes to discuss existentialism and listen to jazz; and the district has also long been associated with American expatriates from Thomas Jefferson to Ernest Hemingway. Johnson, who’s written about Americans in...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Aug.31.2004

L'Affaire

Amy Hawkins, a young dot-com executive from California who has made her fortune at the top of NASDAQ, sets off for Europe to find culture, her roots, and maybe a cause to devote her considerable fortune to. Amy starts her quest at one of the finest small hotels in the French Alps—a hotel noted for skiing and its famous cooking lessons—in the town of Valmeri, amid an assortment of...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Aug.02.2001

Le Mariage

Le Mariage is a sparkling new novel—a comedy of manners from the author of Le Divorce, an acclaimed national bestseller and 1997 National Book Award finalist. Many have compared Diane Johnson to such great literary figures as Jane Austen, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—all expatriate writers who in one way or another contributed to the development of the “...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jun.01.1998

Burning

Bel Air is a wealthy community nestled in the hills outside of Los Angeles. It is here, among the pastel stucco houses and palm trees, that Bingo Edwards, the New Age wife of an orthopedic surgeon, lives a sheltered and eccentric life raising chickens and box turtles. Her harmonious existence is disrupted when the local fire department arrives to remove the hazardous backyard...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Mar.01.1998

The Shadow Knows

The anonymous heroine, N, is a young woman who has broken free of a constricting marriage and is struggling to raise four children alone in a housing project. Coming home one day N finds her door hacked with an ax and smeared with what appears to be a mixture of blood and crankcase oil. A few days later a strangled cat is left outside her apartment door. Everyday, she is plagued by...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.11.1993

Natural Opium: Some Travelers' Tales

A collection of ten travel essays. Johnson's destinations include the Great Barrier Reef and Serengeti National Park. All the while, Johnson brings her trademark humor and honesty as she observes human nature and recounts her experiences.

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.19.1990

Health and Happiness

This “brilliant, engaging, cleverly manipulated piece of fiction” (San Francisco Chronicle), written by the author of Le Divorce, captures the moral dilemmas and life-and-death decisions that are the foundation of hospital life, portraying the continuous clashes of motive and sensibility that create the ongoing comedy of medical manners.

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Mar.12.1987

Persian Nights

From the author of Le Divorce comes another alluring, fast-paced novel of an American woman abroad. While visiting Iran with her husband, Chloe Fowler is left to travel alone when he is summoned home unexpectedly. Initially drawn to the life she encounters in Iran, Chloe soon experiences frightening events that exposes the darker side of this “colonial life.”

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.01.1983

Dashiell Hammett, a Life

This is the definitive biography of one of America's most important, most fascinating and most enigmatic twentieth-century writers. It is the first and only book on Hammett written with the full cooperation of his longtime friend Lillian Hellman, Hammett's late wife Josephine and his daughters. Dashiell Hammett's great original contribution to American Literature was the creation...

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Sep.12.1982

Terrorists and Novelists

A collection of essays nominated for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize.

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.01.1978

Lying Low

A National Book Award finalist, this novel relates the events of four crucial days in the lives of four people sharing a rambling Victorian house, “lying low” and harboring secrets not meant to be shared. Theo Wait, a middle-aged former ballet dancer, and her brother, Anton, have taken in two boarders: beautiful Lynn, who never receives mail or visitors; and energetic and effusive...

Add to Bag

Write a review

Learn more »

PUBLISHED: Jan.01.1972

The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

A biography of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith based on Meredith's own writing and historical context.

Buy now

Write a review

Learn more »

Diane's Latest Blogs

View all»

Dec.03.2007 - 12:20 am

Self-Discovery Versus "Right Behavior"

I think all writers have subjects that they tend to be preoccupied with, and one of the things that interests me is not exactly the nature of happiness, but the nature of ... the...

Published Reviews

View all»

May.15.2005

Published by The Washington Post

For [Johnson], Paris is the Paris most Americans dream of, and for visitors eager to get off the beaten track of tourist sites and follow a more intimate and imaginative route,...

About Diane

A two-time finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Diane Johnson has drawn comparisons to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton with her comedies of manners about Americans living and loving abroad. Johnson’s books include L’Affaire (2004...

Read full bio »

Diane JohnsonAn American-born novelist, essayist, and screenwriter

Featured Works

Diane's Latest Blogs

Published Reviews

About Diane

Diane Johnson
An American-born novelist, essayist, and screenwriter