Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949–2017) was an American novelist, poet, and playwright. Born in Munich, Germany, to a US diplomatic official, he grew up in various places including Washington D.C., Tokyo, and Manila, before settling in the United States. He studied at the University of Iowa and struggled with addiction in his youth, experiences that directly informed his most celebrated work. Johnson's debut novel Angels (1983) was followed by Fiskadoro (1985) and Jesus' Son (1992), a story collection that became a defining text of American minimalism. His National Book Award–winning novel Tree of Smoke (2007), a vast, hallucinatory novel of the Vietnam War, established him as one of America's greatest writers. Train Dreams (2012), a novella about a labourer in the early twentieth-century American West, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He died of liver cancer in May 2017.