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Denis Johnson was born on July 1, 1949, in Munich, Germany. His father, Alfred, was a diplomat for the U.S. State Department, and his mother, Vera, was a homemaker. Due to his father's diplomatic career, the family relocated several times during Johnson's childhood, residing in Manila, Tokyo, and ultimately settling in Washington, D.C.
Johnson studied English at the University of Iowa, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1971. As an undergraduate, Johnson published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969). After graduating, he earned an MFA from the school’s prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974. At the workshop, he studied under American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver.
In his 20s, Johnson’s life and career were derailed due to drug and alcohol addictions. Johnson began drinking and using drugs at the age of 14. By the time he was 21, his alcohol abuse had become so severe that he sought treatment in a psychiatric ward. Despite this intervention, his addictions continued to persist. In 1973, Johnson was homeless and living in Berkeley, California. He would later write about this period in “Homeless and High,” his 2002 essay for The New Yorker magazine. Johnson worried that getting sober might inhibit his writing. However, he eventually realized that he was not accomplishing much writing while drunk or high. He quit serious drugs in the mid-70s, then alcohol in 1978, and finally marijuana in 1983.
Johnson’s sober 1980s saw a definite increase in published materials beginning with his 1982 poetry collection Incognito Lounge. In 1983, he published his critically lauded first novel, Angels, about two characters on a tragic odyssey across America. He wrote three more novels in the following eight years.
Johnson first published “Emergency” in The New Yorker magazine in 1991 before including it in his collection of short stories, Jesus’ Son. Johnson’s drug-using narrator relates all eleven interconnected stories in the collection. Readers know him only by his colorful and obscene nickname, Fuckhead, which was Johnson’s own nickname in his 20s.
At first, Johnson did not think he would publish the stories that would become Jesus’ Son. He felt that they were too strange and too personal. He didn’t want people to know that side of him, as some of the stories are based on anecdotes from his own life. Others are based on stories told to him by people he knew.
Jesus’ Son became a major motion picture in 1999. The film stars Billy Crudup as FH and Jack Black as Georgie. Johnson makes a cameo appearance in the film as Terrance Weber, the man stabbed in the eye by his jealous wife.
Denis Johnson was 67 years old when he died from liver cancer in May 2017. Later that year, he was posthumously awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
