美国国家公共电台 NPR Denis Johnson, Author Who Wrote 'Jesus' Son,' Dies At 67

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The literary world is mourning the death of a man who has been called one of the greatest writers of his generation. Denis Johnson won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died of cancer on Wednesday at the age of 67. NPR's Lynn Neary has this remembrance.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE¹: Johnson, says Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi, is a writer's writer. Galassi worked with Johnson on some of his best-known books - his story collection "Jesus' Son," his Vietnam War novel "Tree Of Smoke" which won the National Book Award and his novella "Train Dreams" which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Johnson may have gotten the most attention for his prose, Galassi says, but he wrote with the empathy of a poet.

JONATHAN GALASSI: He started out as a poet, and then he started writing novels. And I remember him once saying, well, I can dream these novels up in a day, but it takes me months to write them.

NEARY: Galassi says Johnson was perhaps the most original writer of his generation. His work is infused with a hallucinatory quality, born out of his experiences in the 1960s and '70s.

GALASSI: In his early phase of life, those hallucinations were enhanced by controlled substances which were part of the magic and the horror of his imagination.

NEARY: Johnson recovered from drug addiction² in the late 1970s. But in 1991, he told WHYY's Fresh Air that he held onto some of the insights he had gained during his time on drugs.

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DENIS JOHNSON: The world is very poetic³ as I experienced it. You know, you can just open a door, and there'll be a world of fire and chaos⁴ on the other side. And you can shut that door and open another, and you know, all is sweetness and light. And I think that's something I experienced by messing up my head a lot, and it's something that stayed with me. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad perception to have.

NEARY: Johnson was able to balance violence with transcendence in his work. His writing was not biographical, says publisher Jonathan Galassi, but he drew deeply from his own experiences.

GALASSI: He has experienced the intensity⁵, the depth, the despair, the direct hit of life in similar ways. And I think he's very, very touched by it, destroyed by it. There's something very religious about Denis' work, I think.

NEARY: Galassi says he's been touched by the large number of people who have contacted him since news of Denis Johnson's death has spread, a tribute, he says, to how important Johnson was to so many. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

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