Denis Hale Johnson (July 1, 1949 – May 24, 2017)<!--immed. source is Ext link LCCN--> was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction. Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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.
Early years
Denis Johnson was born on July 1, 1949, in Munich, West Germany. His mother, the former Vera Louise Childress, was a homemaker. where he also returned to teach.
Career
Johnson published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The Man Among Seals, in 1969 at the age of 19.
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
Johnson came to prominence in 1992 with the short story collection Jesus' Son, which included vignettes originally published in The New Yorker, 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.
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. The novella, adapted into a film with the same title, was directed and co-written by Clint Bentley. It premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix to premiere the same 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.
The final book he published while still alive was the novel The Laughing Monsters, which he called a "literary thriller" set in Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Congo. It was released in 2014. Johnson's final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in January 2018.
Personal life
Johnson was twice divorced and lived with his third wife, Cindy Lee, in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time of his death.
For most of his 20s, Johnson was addicted to drugs and alcohol and did not do much writing. In 1978, he moved 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.
Death
Johnson died on May 24, 2017, from liver cancer at his home in [[Sea Ranch, California|The Sea
Ranch]],