Described by an anonymous reviewer for Esquire (December 1985) as "a writer who slips smoothly from poetry to the novel and back again," Denis Johnson has produced a significant body of work since he began publishing in the late 1960s. His poetry is distinguished by its stylistic vitality and emotional honesty, indicating his intense engagement with language and experience. Forgiveness and surviving memories and mistakes of the past are his dominant themes, since it is impossible to live, in his words, as a "fallen person."

Johnson was born on 1 July 1949 in Munich, Germany, the older of the two sons of Vera Childress Johnson and Alfred Nair Johnson. As a consequence of his father's working for the United States Information Agency, Johnson had an international upbringing until he was in his mid teens. "I had an ideal childhood in Tokyo," he recounts in an interview with Lynda Hull and David...