Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson

DRAGON

2012 / Books of the year

Denis Johnson / A brief survey of the short story

Denis Johnson / Tree of Smoke /  Review by Geoff Dyer

Denis Johnson Interview / "I think I actually am Graham Greene" 

Tree of Smoke author Denis Johnson dies aged 67

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Denis Johnson / El nombre del mundo / Reseña

Denis Johnson / Sueños de trenes / Reseña

Así comienza / Sueños de trenes, de Denis Johnson

Muere Denis Johnson, el autor de ‘Hijo de Jesús’

Denis Johnson

Poet Details

July 1, 1949–May 24, 2017

Poet, writer, and playwright Denis Johnson was born in Munich, Germany, where his father worked for the State Department. He grew up in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington DC, and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. At one time addicted to drugs and alcohol, Johnson’s literary output increased significantly after he became sober. In 1973 he was homeless in Berkeley, California, an experience he recounted in a New Yorker essay “Homeless and High.” Few writers have been so highly regarded—in all genres he worked in—by critics, readers, and fellow writers. He told the Los Angeles Times in 2014, “I get bored quickly and try another style, another genre, another form. ... To me the writing is all one thing, or maybe I should say it's all nothing. The truth is, I just write sentences.”

Johnson published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of 20. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (1982), and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (1995). His poems often depict characters on the margins of society. Reviewing The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems in the New York Times Book Review, Alan Williamson wrote,  “[Johnson] convinces me that he suffers over the anomie he describes. He is hard on himself, as well as on the culture; and he is agonizingly aware that life can be, and has been, different from the life around him ... he knows how to use his eyes.” On his poetic influences, Johnson stated, “My ear for the diction and rhythms of poetry was trained by—in chronological order—Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and T.S. Eliot. Other influences come and go, but those I admire the most and those I admired the earliest (I still admire them) have something to say in every line I write.”

Johnson is the author of numerous novels, including Fiskadoro (1985), Nobody Move (2009), and Tree of Smoke, a novel about covert operations in the Vietnam War, won the 2007 National Book Award. Jesus’ Son (1992), his collection of short stories that focus on the lives of drug addicts, was made into a film of the same name in 1999. He received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Whiting Writer’s Award.

Johnson died in 2017.

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

SELECTED WORKS

Novels

• Angels (Knopf,1983)
• Fiskadoro (Knopf, 1985) 
• The Stars at Noon (Knopf, 1986) 
• Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux [FSG], 1991) 
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (Harper Collins, 1997) 
• The Name of the World (Harper, 2000) 
• Tree of Smoke (FSG, 2007)
• Nobody Move (FSG, 2009)
• Train Dreams (FSG, 2011) – a novella first published in The Paris Review [2002] and in Europe [2004]
• The Laughing Monsters 

Short story collections

• Jesus' Son 

Poetry

• The Man Among the Seals: Poems (Stone Wall Press, 1969)
• Inner Weather (Graywolf Press, 1976)
• The Incognito Lounge (Random House, 1982)
• The Veil (Knopf, 1985)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (HarperPerennial, 1995)

Plays

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

Screenplays

• The Prom (1990) (directed by Steven Shainberg)
• Hit Me (1996) (directed by Steven Shainberg, adapted from the novel A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thompson)

Nonfiction

• (contributor) One Man By Himself: Portraits of John Serl (Hard Press, 1995) 
• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (essays) (Harper Collins, 2001)

POETRY FOUNDATION
WIKIPMEDIA