Denis Johnson

Denis Hale Johnson (born July 1, 1949) is an American writer best known for his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.

Early years

Johnson was born in 1949 in Munich, West Germany. Growing up, he also lived in the Philippines, Japan, and the suburbs of Washington.^[1] His father worked for the State Department as a liaison between the USIA and the CIA.^[2][3] He holds a BA in English and an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he has also returned to teach.^[1] While at the Writers' Workshop, he took classes from Raymond Carver.^[4]

Career

Johnson published his first book of poetry, The Man Among Seals, in 1969 at the age of 19.^[1] He earned a measure of acclaim with the publication of his first novel, Angels, in 1983.^[3] He came to prominence in 1992 with the short story collection Jesus' Son, which included vignettes originally published in The New Yorker.^[3] He has said the collection was inspired by Isaac Babel’s short story collection Red Cavalry.^[2] In a 2006 New York Times Book Review poll, it was voted one of the best works of American fiction published in the last 25 years.^[5] 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.^[6]

Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction^[7] and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[8] 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, which is set in the early 1980s.^[9]

Train Dreams, originally published as a story in The Paris Review in 2002, was published as a novella in 2012 and was a finalist for that year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, for the first time since 1977, the Pulitzer board did not award a prize for fiction that year.^[10]

Johnson's plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle.^[11][12][13] He is the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.^[14] In 2006 and 2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.^[15]

Johnson's latest novel, The Laughing Monsters, which he has called a "literary thriller" set in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Congo, was published on November 4, 2014.^[16][17]

Personal life

Johnson is twice divorced and lives with his third wife, Cindy Lee, in Phoenix, Arizona and northern Idaho.^[4] He has three children, two of whom he homeschooled; in October 1997 he wrote an article for the website Salon in defense of homeschooling.^[18]

For most of his twenties, Johnson was addicted to drugs and alcohol and did not do much writing. In 1978 he moved back to his parents’ home in Scottsdale, Arizona, to sober up and find direction. He stopped drinking alcohol in 1978, and quit recreational drugs in 1983.^[1]

Awards

• 1981 – National Poetry Series award, for The Incognito Lounge^[19]
• 1983 – The Frost Place poet in residence^[20]
• 1986 – Guggenheim Fellowship^[21]
• 1986 – Whiting Award^[22]
• 1993 – Lannan Fellowship in Fiction^[23]
• 2002 – Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review, for Train Dreams^[24]
• 2007 – National Book Award, for Tree of Smoke^[7][25]
• 2008 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, for Tree of Smoke^[8]
• 2012 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, for Train Dreams^[10]

Works

Novels

• Angels (1983)
• Fiskadoro (1985)
• The Stars at Noon (1986)
• Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991)
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (1998)
• The Name of the World (2000)
• Tree of Smoke (2007)
• Nobody Move (2009)
• The Laughing Monsters (2014)

Novellas

• Train Dreams (2002, reprinted 2011)

Short story collections

• Jesus' Son (1992)

Poetry collections

• The Man Among the Seals: Poems (Stone Wall Press, 1969)
• Inner Weather (Graywolf Press, 1976)
• The Incognito Lounge (Random House, 1982)
• The Veil (Knopf, 1987)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (HarperCollins, 1995)

Portraits

• One Man By Himself: Portraits of John Serl (1995)

Plays

• Hellhound on My Trail: A Drama in Three Parts (2000)
• Shoppers: Two Plays (inlcudes Hellhound on My Trail, 2002)
• Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse (2012)

Screenplays

• The Prom (1990) (Directed by Steven Shainberg)

Nonfiction

• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (essays) (2001)

References

External links

• Works by or about Denis Johnson in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Denis Johnson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco
• KCRW Bookworm Interview
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation
• Denis Johnson at Library of Congress Authorities — with 25 catalog records