American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter who is noted for his works of social satire, personal analysis, and Irish American life.

After graduating from Princeton University (A.B., 1954), Dunne briefly served in the military and became a staff writer for Time magazine in New York City. He married novelist Joan Didion (Didion, Joan) in 1964 and moved to California, where he contributed to numerous magazines—including a joint column with his wife in the Saturday Evening Post (1967–69)—and wrote screenplays with his wife, including A Star Is Born (1976; with others) and Up Close and Personal (1996).

Dunne's first book, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike (1967; rev. ed., 1971), examines the labour and social issues surrounding the grape pickers' strike of the mid-1960s. The Studio (1969) is a telling portrait of the motion-picture industry as seen through the eyes of the movie studio executives. Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974) describes the narrator's nervous breakdown in a story about three colourful inhabitants of Las Vegas, Nevada. Dunne examined Irish American communities in a gritty trilogy of novels: True Confessions (1977; filmed 1981), Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982), and The Red White and Blue (1987). His other works include the autobiographical Harp (1988); two collections of essays, Quintana & Friends (1978) and Crooning (1990); and the novels Playland (1994) and Nothing Lost (2004).