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Article snippet: Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67. The cause was liver cancer, his literary agent Nicole Aragi said. Mr. Johnson came to his down-on-their-luck characters through personal experience. He had published a book of poetry, “The Man Among the Seals,” at 19 and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Iowa. But addictions to alcohol and drugs, including heroin, derailed him. He was in a psychiatric ward at 21, he said, and hospitalized again during the first of his three marriages. Mr. Johnson initially believed that sobriety would damage his creativity, but later realized that his addictions were not fueling much writing. “I finally figured it only meant I’d be writing three paragraphs less a year,” he told New York magazine in 2002, “because I’d only written two stories and 37 poems in almost a decade.” That output would accelerate. By the early 1980s he was sober and had begun a prolific few decades, turning out novels, plays, poetry and journalism. In his 1983 novel, “Angels,” a character on death row sits strapped in a gas chamber listening almost rapturously to his heartbeat as he awaits the end. “Boom … Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one?” Mr. Johnson ... Link to the full article to read more