The same year that Englander praised him on NPR, Johnson went on to win the National Book Award for a significantly heftier work - at least in physical size. 'He doesn't ever romanticize these dark settings while leaving his narrator open to the fact that, despite it all, we may live in a heartbreakingly romantic world,' Englander wrote of Johnson in 2007, adding: 'With dialogue that feels like you're getting it verbatim and stripped-down prose, he writes simple, honest stories that have the bigness of great work.' 'Brutally honest and painfully beautiful' - that's how novelist Nathan Englander described Johnson's work in 1992's Jesus' Son, a brief, unvarnished set of interwoven stories that focus on the desperate lives of drug addicts. 'He wrote prose with the imaginative concentration and empathy of the poet he was.'

'Denis was one of the great writers of his generation,' FSG's president and publisher, Jonathan Galassi, said in a statement Friday. His literary agent, Nicole Aragi, confirmed that Johnson died Wednesday of liver cancer.

Johnson's publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, initially announced that the National Book Award-winning novelist died Thursday, but it later amended the account to say his death came the day before. A protean stylist who made a career of defying readers' expectations, he crafted fiction, poetry and reportage that was often as unsparing as it was unconventional. Denis Johnson, who won the 2007 National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, died Thursday.Ĭindy Johnson/ Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Girouxĭenis Johnson, the author behind the seminal collection Jesus' Son, has died at the age of 67.

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