Denis Johnson (born 1949) is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus’ Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.He also writes plays, poetry, and non-fiction. “Train Dreams”, a novella originally published in The Paris Review in 2002, was published as a novel in 2011 and was a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize.