Denis Johnson

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Denis Hale Johnson (July 1, 1949 - May 24, 2017) was an American writer best known for his book Jesus' Son (1992) and his book Tree of Smoke (2007), which received the National Book Award for Fiction.

He has written plays, poetry, journalism, and non-fiction.

Early years

Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, on July 1, 1949. Alfred Johnson, his father, who grew up in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington, D.C., served with the State Department as a liaison between the USIA and the CIA. Vera Louise Childress, his mother, was a homemaker. He obtained a B.A. In 1971, an M.F.A. received a degree in English (in 1971). (in 1974) from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he later returned to teach. Johnson took classes with Raymond Carver at the Writers' Workshop.

Personal life

Johnson earned a bachelor's and master's degree in English from the University of Iowa, where he later returned to teach in his later years.

At the time of his death, Johnson was divorced twice and lived with his third wife, Cindy Lee, in Phoenix, Arizona. They also bought a house in Idaho. Johnson had three children, two of whom he homeschooled; in October 1997, he wrote an article for the website Salon to promote homeschooling.

Johnson was hooked on heroin and alcohol for the bulk of his twenties, but he did not do much writing. In 1978, he returned to his parents' house in Scottsdale, Arizona, to sober up and find direction. In 1978, he stopped drinking alcohol and started using recreational drugs, but 1983, he began to smoke cigarettes.

Source

Career

Johnson published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The Man Among Seals, in 1969 at the age of 19. He earned a measure of acclaim with the publication of his first novel, Angels, in 1983. He came to prominence in 1992 with the short story collection Jesus' Son, which included vignettes originally published in The New Yorker, inspired by Isaac Babel’s book Red Cavalry. In a 2006 New York Times Book Review poll, Jesus' Son was voted one of the best works of American fiction published in the last 25 years. It has been variously described as: seminal, legendary, transcendent, a classic, and a masterpiece. It was adapted into the 1999 film of the same name, which starred Billy Crudup. Johnson has a cameo role in the film as a man who has been stabbed in the eye by his wife.

The Stars at Noon (1986), a spy thriller, follows an unnamed American woman during the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1984. It was adapted into the 2022 film Stars at Noon by director Claire Denis, starring Joe Alwyn and Margaret Qualley.

Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It takes place during the Vietnam War, spanning the years 1963–70, with a coda set in 1983. In the novel, we learn the history of Bill Houston, a main character in Johnson’s first novel Angels, the latter novel set in the early 1980s.

Train Dreams, originally published as a story in The Paris Review in 2002, was published as a novella in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, for the first time since 1977, the Pulitzer board did not award a prize for fiction that year.

Johnson's plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. He was the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2006 and 2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Johnson also occasionally taught at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. The final book he published while still alive was a novel, The Laughing Monsters, which he called a "literary thriller" set in Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Congo. It was released on November 4, 2014. Johnson's final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in January 2018.

Source

Awards

• 1981 – National Poetry Series award (selected by Mark Strand), for The Incognito Lounge
• 1983 – The Frost Place poet in residence
• 1986 – Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1986 – Whiting Award
• 1993 – Lannan Fellowship in Fiction
• 2002 – Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review, for Train Dreams
• 2007 – National Book Award, for Tree of Smoke
• 2008 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, for Tree of Smoke
• 2012 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, for Train Dreams
• 2017 – Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (awarded posthumously)