Denis Johnson

Johnson was born in Munich to a State Department employee and grew up partly in Tokyo, Manila, and Washington, D.C., before publishing his first poetry collection at nineteen while still barely out of his teens. Heavy drug and alcohol addiction consumed much of his twenties, an ordeal he later mined directly for the linked stories of Jesus' Son, narrated by a drifting addict readers know only as Fuckhead.

He worked for years as a journalist as well as a novelist, reporting from conflict zones including Liberia and Somalia for essays later collected in Seek. Tree of Smoke, his sprawling Vietnam War novel, won the National Book Award in 2007.

He lived reclusively for decades in northern Idaho, writing plays and fiction largely out of the public eye, and died of liver cancer in 2017.