Denis Johnson, National Book Award­­–winning novelist, short story writer, and poet, passed away on Wednesday, May 24, according to his publisher, Jonathan Galassi, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He was sixty-seven.

Galassi wrote in a message about Johnson, “Denis was one of the great writers of his generation. He wrote prose with the imaginative concentration and empathy of the poet he was.”

Johnson won a National Book Award in 2007 for Tree of Smoke, and his novella Train Dreams was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His collection of stories, Jesus’ Son, was much loved, and adapted into a film in 1999. Nathan Englander called it “Brutally honest and painfully beautiful…. [Johnson] doesn’t ever romanticize these dark settings while leaving his narrator open to the fact that, despite it all, we may live in a heartbreakingly romantic world.”

Johnson published his first book of poems, The Man Among the Seals, in 1969, at the age of twenty. His last book, a novel, was The Laughing Monsters in 2014.

Photo Credit: Cindy Lee Johnson/Farrar, Straus & Giroux