Joan Didion and Al Filreis discuss Ernest Hemingway at the Kelly Writers House, March 31, 2009 as part of the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

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Novelist, essayist and screenwriter Joan Didion has been an incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years. Her distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers.

Funded by a grant from Paul Kelly, the Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction -- more honored in practice than in theory -- between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other.