Diane Johnson, born Diane Lain, is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living abroad in contemporary France. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988.
Johnson attended Stephens College, a small women's college in Missouri. In her sophomore year she entered the Mademoiselle magazine Guest Editor contest and was selected as one of 20 women from across the United States to work on the magazine for a month in New York City in 1953. The month at the magazine would prove to be formative in her eventual career as a writer. Another member of the group was Sylvia Plath who would write about the experience in her novel The Bell Jar. Johnson shadowed the Health and Beauty editor and was responsible for answering readers' questions about makeup. In a piece she wrote for the September 2003 edition of Vogue magazine, Johnson said, "I still have a strong memory of Plath's white straw beret, her blonde pageboy and cheerful face. " In the Vogue article, Johnson wrote the month at Mademoiselle and her exposure to Plath taught her a key lesson. "I realized that if you took pains with your writing, you could make art, and that the rather facile little stories I had dashed off for my English classes or the school magazine were probably not art. It was, in fact, the example of "Sunday at the Mintons'," Sylvia Plath's winning story in the Guest Editor contest, that made that point to me and changed my life, though not immediately." Johnson went on to say, "Writing was a serious form of work, and to be serious, like those New York editors, you had to send in your stories. Writers and editors were embarked on a consequential enterprise, the business of literature and books. What happiness to have been taught that lesson; I did send in my novels." That same year, 1953, Johnson married B. Lamar Johnson Jr.. Within eight years, she had given birth to four children with him: Kevin, Darcy, Amanda, and Simon. In the Vogue article she wrote, "Novel-writing would become my refuge during moments snatched during their naps and play visits. New York..came to symbolize a road not taken, but I was not sorry, exactly, for if I had stayed in New York, I probably would not have done my writing." After separating from and divorcing Johnson, in 1968 she married John Frederic Murray, a physician who became chief of pulmonary and critical care at San Francisco General Hospital. After Murray's retirement, the two divided their time between homes in Paris, where Murray died of COVID-19 in March 2020 at the age of 92, and San Francisco.
