Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Angels | 1983 |
| Fiskadoro | 1985 |
| The Stars at Noon | 1986 |
| Resuscitation of a Hanged Man | 1991 |
| Already Dead: A California Gothic | 1997 |
| The Name of the World | 2000 |
| Tree of Smoke | 2007 |
| Nobody Move | 2009 |
| The Laughing Monsters | 2014 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Train Dreams | 2011 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Jesus’ Son | 1992 |
| The Largesse of the Sea Maiden | 2018 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| The Man Among the Seals | 1969 |
| Inner Weather | 1976 |
| The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems | 1982 |
| The Veil | 1987 |
| The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New | 1995 |
Publication Order of Plays
| Shoppers: Two Plays | 2002 |
| Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse | 2012 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond | 2001 |
About Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson (born 1949, died 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for the story collection “Jesus’ Son” (1992), the Vietnam War novel “Tree of Smoke” (2007), which won the National Book Award for Fiction, and the novella “Train Dreams”.
Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, on 1 July 1949. His father worked for the State Department, and he grew up in the Philippines, Japan and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He took a BA in English and an MFA at the University of Iowa, where Raymond Carver was among his teachers, and published a first book of poems, “The Man Among the Seals”, in 1969 at the age of nineteen. For most of his twenties he was addicted to drugs and alcohol and wrote little. He stopped drinking in 1978.
From 1979 to 1981 he taught creative writing at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, an experience that pushed him to finish his first novel, “Angels” (1983), about a young mother and an ex-convict who meet on an interstate bus. “Fiskadoro” (1985) is set in Florida decades after a nuclear war, and “The Stars at Noon” (1986) follows an American woman in Nicaragua in 1984. Claire Denis filmed the latter in 2022.
“Jesus’ Son”, a cycle of eleven linked stories, brought him to prominence and was filmed in 1999 with Billy Crudup; Johnson has a cameo in it. “Tree of Smoke” follows a CIA officer in Vietnam between 1963 and 1970 and brings back Bill Houston from “Angels”. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as was “Train Dreams”, the life of an American railroad labourer. That story first ran in The Paris Review in 2002 and came out as a book in 2011. A film adaptation was released on Netflix in 2025.
Johnson also wrote plays, serving as resident playwright of the Campo Santo company in San Francisco, and a book of reportage, “Seek” (2001). The last book published in his lifetime was “The Laughing Monsters” (2014), a thriller set in Uganda, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He died of liver cancer on 24 May 2017 at his home near Gualala, California, aged 67. A final story collection, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”, appeared in 2018.
Photo: Oliver Mark, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).