Denis johnson biography
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Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson was born in Munich on July 1, , and raised in Tokyo, Manila, and the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. He studied with Raymond Carver while earning his MFA from the University of Iowa. While still enrolled, his first book of verse, The Man Among the Seals (Stone Wall Press, ), was published.
During the next few years, Johnson published several more collections of poetry, including The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (Harper Perennial, ); The Veil (Alfred A. Knopf, ); The Incognito Lounge (Random House, ), selected by Mark Strand for the National Poetry Series in ; and Inner Weather (Graywolf, ).
Johnson is also the author of numerous works of fiction, including Train Dreams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; Nobody Move (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ); Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), winner of the National Book Award; Jesus' Son (Harper Perennial, ), which was later adapted for the screen; and Angels (Alfred A. Knopf, ), which received the Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is als
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Denis Johnson. Photo by Cindy Johnson.
Denis Johnson (July 1, – May 24, ) was an American writer best known for his short story collection Jesus’ Son () and his novel Tree of Smoke (), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He also wrote plays, poetry, journalism, and non-fiction.
Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It takes place during the Vietnam War, spanning the years –70, with a coda set in 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 s.
Train Dreams, originally published as a story in The Paris Review in , was published as a novella in and was a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, for the first time since , 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 and , Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Johnson would also occasionally teach at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of T