Johnson published his first book, a collection of poetry titled
The Man Among Seals, in 1969 at the age of 19.
The Stars at Noon (1986), a spy thriller, follows an unnamed American woman during the
Nicaraguan Revolution of 1984. It was adapted into the 2022 film
Stars at Noon by director
Claire Denis, starring
Joe Alwyn and
Margaret Qualley.
Tree of Smoke won the 2007
National Book Award for Fiction Johnson came to prominence in 1992 with the short story collection ''
Jesus' Son, which included vignettes originally published in The New Yorker'', It has been variously described as: seminal, legendary, transcendent, a classic, and a masterpiece. It was adapted into the 1999
film of the same name, which starred
Billy Crudup. Johnson has a
cameo role in the film as a man who has been stabbed in the eye by his wife.
Train Dreams, originally published as a story in
The Paris Review in 2002, was published as a
novella in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, for the first time since 1977, the Pulitzer board did not award a prize for fiction that year. The novella,
adapted into a film with the same title, was directed and co-written by
Clint Bentley. It premiered at the 2025
Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by
Netflix to premiere the same year. Johnson's plays have been produced in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. He was the Resident Playwright of Campo Santo, the resident theater company at
Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2006 and 2007, Johnson held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at
Texas State University in
San Marcos,
Texas. Johnson also occasionally taught at the
Michener Center for Writers at the
University of Texas at Austin. The final book he published while still alive was the novel
The Laughing Monsters, which he called a "literary thriller" set in Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Congo. It was released in 2014. Johnson's final work, a book of short stories titled
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in January 2018. ==Personal life==