Jesus' Son

Content Warning: Jesus’ Son includes depictions of sexual assault, murder, substance use disorder, racist language, stalking, self-harm, and death by suicide.

Denis Hale Johnson was an acclaimed American novelist, short story author, and poet. Born in 1949 in Munich, Germany, Johnson published his first book of poetry at the age of 19 in 1969. He earned a BA in English from the University of Iowa, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While Johnson is best known for Jesus’ Son, which is widely regarded as one of the most important American short story collections of the 1990s, he also won a National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke, as well as two shortlists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In total, Johnson published nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, and three poetry collections before his death in 2017.

For most of the 1970s, Johnson had a substance use disorder, particularly with heroin. During this period, he did not write much. Johnson quit drinking alcohol in 1978 and quit recreational drugs in 1983; Johnson was then hired to teach at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, during which time he composed the stories that make up Jesus’ Son. Much of the critical acclaim for Jesus’ Son stems from the perceived verisimilitude of the scenes of drug use; Johnson incorporated many of his real-life experiences into the collection, contributing to its authenticity. In addition, the narrative voice of Jesus’ Son has been acclaimed as lyrical, intense, and surreal, and is considered to realistically mimic the thinking of a person with a long-term substance use disorder, like Johnson.