>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Robert Newlen: I want to welcome you
to the 17th National Book Festival.
It's hard to believe 17, and I've been around for all of them.
Today we open the fiction pavilion by following tradition,
with a ceremony bestowing this year's Library
of Congress prize in American fiction.
However, before I start, I want to recognize Marie Arana.
Marie has made invaluable contributions to American letters,
both as coordinator of this prize,
and one of the driving forces behind the National Book Festival.
This incredible program that we see today is with great thanks to Marie.
A gifted and highly praised writer, and scholar in her own right,
Marie brings passion and a generous spirit to everything she does,
and it is a real privilege to work with her.
Marie, will you please stand?
[ Applause ]
So, let me tell you a little bit about the prize.
It's meant to honor an American literary writer whose body
of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art,
but also for its originality of thought and imagination.
The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices
that throughout long, consistently accomplished careers have told us
something about the American experience.
Previous winners of the prize include Don DeLilo, E.L. Doctorow,
Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth,
and last year, Marilynne Robinson.
For 2017, the Library of Congress and its distinguished jury
of 27 writers and critics
from around the world selected Denis Johnson for this honor.
Last March the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Hayden,
offered the prize to Mr. Johnson, and he enthusiastically accepted.
It was the last major honor he was
to receive before his tragic death on May 24th.
Today we pay homage to his life and work,
with some very special guests reading citations from just a few
of Johnson's fellow writers and admirers.
First though, let's begin with a video tribute to our prizewinner.
>> Marie Arana: English words are like prisms, empty.
Nothing inside.
And still, they make rainbows.
So says a character in Already Dead, a novel by the late,
great American writer Denis Johnson.
Johnson's stories, as legions of his fans know, are also prisms.
They are hard, merciless, flinty, and yet they too make rainbows.
He has been called a writer's writer's writer.
And, for all the enigma of that string of words,
they hold a simple truth.
Those who bring language to life recognize Johnson's gifts instantly.
Louise Erdrich calls his work profound and transcendent.
Jonathan Franzen finds his sentences miracles of transparency and tone.
Philip Roth calls him daring, terrifying, and an emissary
for tortured, broken souls.
Marilynne Robinson marvels that a writer's personal passions
and energies can be so inextricably wedded to his words.
All agree Denis Johnson has managed to give us minimalist,
yet distinctly ecstatic and hallucinatory, rainbow prose.
He is an American original.
He was born in 1949 in Munich, Germany, and raised in Tokyo
and Manila, the child of American diplomats.
As a teenager, moving back to Washington,
D.C. during the tumultuous '60's, he came to know the country
and the restless characters he would capture so vividly in his fiction.
He graduated in English literature from the University of Iowa,
and earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop,
where he returned as a teacher.
He has also taught at Texas State University,
and the University of Texas at Austin.
In the course of his fevered career, he published novels,
short stories, journalism, and poetry.
Among his best-known works are those about the flotsam
and jetsam of American life.
The Laughing Monsters.
Nobody Move.
Tree of Smoke.
Already Dead.
Jesus' Son.
Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
The Stars at Noon.
Fiskadoro.
Angels. He's received numerous award for these,
including a National Book Award, a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction,
a Writing Writers award, and in 2008,
he was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Throughout he has chronicled an America
that has gone unobserved, unrecorded.
Here are our drug addicts, our war veterans, our disaffected,
our used up and left behind.
And yet, the most affecting and rewarding aspect
of Denis Johnson's fiction is that in work after work,
he has proved that beauty often lurks in unexpected places.
That strength can be found in failure.
That the human spirit is a fragile, but resilient vessel.
His is a very American story.
He once described his works as pressure cookers of language.
His characters as those who inhabit life's perilous edge.
As time wore on, he found that he himself was all too vulnerable
to these human frailties.
When the Librarian of Congress,
Carla Hayden offered Denis Johnson the Library of Congress Prize
for American Fiction in March of 2017, he wrote in an email message,
"My head is spinning from such great news."
Two months later, tragically, he was dead.
The Library is very proud to honor, posthumously,
this extraordinary human being and writer, whose contributions
to the American canon have been lasting and invaluable.
As the Librarian wrote when the prize was announced in June 2017,
Denis Johnson was a writer for our times.
In prose that fused grace with grit, he spun tale after tale
about our walking wounded,
the demons that haunt, the salvation we seek.
We emerge from his imagined world with profound empathy,
a different perspective-- a little changed.
We're very proud to count Denis Johnson among the distinguished
winners of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
As you can see, he was a towering figure in letters,
and I hope that we send out the word for more readers
for Denis Johnson's work.
We received at the Library of Congress right away,
upon Denis' death, pleas, really from so many writers,
and so many people around the world who were familiar with his work,
and who were in publishing or who were writers themselves,
wanting to give citations for this moment, for this ceremony.
So, we are going to read a few of those citations.
To help me do that, is the publisher at Random House,
Susan Kamil, who's a great friend.
Let's give her a hand.
[ Applause ]
Thank you, Susan, for coming from New York.
And, also Sam Nicholson,
who was Denis Johnson's editor, also of Random House.
[ Applause ]
We'll just start in.
This is from Philip Roth.
"When I was asked to nominate a writer for this year's Library
of Congress Prize for American Fiction, I did so in eight words.
'My sole nominee is the great Denis Johnson.'
Johnson brought news from the darkest, wildest depths
of American life, as Mark Twain did in chapters of Huckleberry Finn,
and Faulkner in a slew of novels.
From the moment I began reading his terrifying first novel, Angels,
I felt the strength, and his daring, and recognized his place
of eminence among those of brilliant American predecessors
for whom desperation and savagery were depicted
with searing originality in a prose style uniquely evocative
of the broken souls, each brought remorselessly into tortured being.
There was no one like him, tracking the descent of what he called,
in Already Dead, isolated minds bending
around tightly, to feed on themselves."
>> Susan Kamil: And, this from Louise Erdrich.
"Denis Johnson's are the rarest sort of books,
works of radical human sympathy,
written with cliff-walking literary genius.
His books involve us in the implosion of the spirit,
and the fragility of personal salvation.
Johnson's work lays bare our faltering human glory and shame.
From the stirring, surreal incantation that is Train Dreams,
to the meticulous hyperreality of Tree of Smoke,
his reach will always be profound.
Although I never had the chance to meet him,
I mourn Denis Johnson's loss personally,
as a reader and fellow writer.
I'm glad he took pleasure in receiving this grand recognition.
Everyone who reads Denis Johnson comes away thinking he has spoken
directly to some wracked and ragged, yet transcendent,
aspect of their own secret heart.
>> Sam Nicholson: From Jonathan Franzen.
"You can tell he started as a poet.
His sentences, at their best, are miracles of transparency and tone.
Perfect in the way they inhabit the page,
but devoid of vanity about their perfection.
Always vivid in their reference to the actual,
but also always conveying something larger.
Their creator's own self-knowledge and compassion,
and sense of cosmic comedy."
>> Marie Arana: And this from Marilynne Robinson.
"I have never known a writer who was so identical with his work,
whose thoughts and passions and energies were so entirely
of one substance with the world he remade as fiction.
The great energy of his imagination was a fusion of honesty
and seriousness, pain and laughter.
His life was a thing of moment and urgency.
Pure and undistracted."
>> Susan Kamil: And this from Zadie Smith.
"No writer was more admired by his peers than Denis Johnson.
His thousands of readers adored him too, of course,
but for writers there was an added layer of professional awe.
How does one go about writing a book as luminous as Train Dreams?
How were the stories of Jesus' Son constructed, with their seamless mix
of the sacred and profane?
So much of Denis' fiction reads like apocrypha
from some long-suppressed American bible.
I loved it all.
He worked at a level different from the rest of us.
A true master."
>> Sam Nicholson: From Nathan Englander.
"I fell in love with Denis Johnson's writing in the purest way possible.
Someone, I can't remember who, gave me a Xeroxed copy of the first story
in Jesus' Son, Car Crash While Hitchhiking.
If you look at the book, you'll see Denis Johnson's name is absent
from the margins.
And, not even the whole title of the story is there.
So, I read what I thought was called Car Crash,
a standalone story by an anonymous author.
I was instantly blown away.
Deeply moved by it, and then, in the way good reading makes you feel
like your connection to it was faded, I soon ended up with a copy
of the collection in which the story appears.
I was living in Iowa City at the time, and this book, for my friends
and me, became sort of a young writers bible.
We marveled at those stripped-down, honest stories
that contained all the bigness of great work.
And, as young writers we thought, this is the kind
of thing that could be done.
We took hope away from the work, is what I'm saying,
and we found hope inside those stories as well.
In Car Crash While Hitchhiking, the narrator ends up back
in detox and at rock bottom.
He's hearing voices, seeing things,
and acknowledging his pitiable state,
he addresses us, his dear readers.
He says quite frankly, 'and you, you ridiculous people,
you expect me to help you.'
Yes. We did.
We expected it and will continue to expect it,
as we return to those stories and novels and essays and poems,
to mine all the help within."
>> Marie Arana: And now, for the ceremony itself, Robert,
would you come back and confer the prize?
>> Robert Newlen: Thank you, Marie, Susan, and Sam for your commitment
to our prize winner and his work.
I would now like to officially bestow the prize.
Denis Johnson's widow, Cindy, could not be with us today,
and has asked that Johnson's agent,
Nicole Aragi, accept it in her place.
Nicole, could you please come to the stage?
Nicole, on behalf of the Librarian of Congress,
I'm pleased to award the 2017 Library of Congress Prize
in American Fiction to Denis Johnson.
Please accept this crystal commemorating the prize.
>> Nicole Aragi: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
OK. As you'll see, Denis had a healthy skepticism of authority,
institutions, and praise of any sort.
But, deep down, I know he was proud to receive this anyway.
I'm receiving this on behalf of Denis Johnson's wife, Cindy Lee.
Denis was honored when he heard he'd been chosen for this award.
He said yes, and then immediately began stewing over it.
By the time Marie Arana called in early May, he had made a decision.
He told her, I don't want some old white guy winning this award during
the Trump administration.
[ Laughter ]
I'm glad you're laughing.
I'm sure Marie was flabbergasted.
I know I was.
Even after 28 years together, he could still surprise me.
In the days that followed, I made my case.
I argued that presidents come and go,
while the Library of Congress abides.
And, I insisted that his singular talent deserved to be recognized
by such a noble American institution.
Denis was unmoved.
The only caveat I could get out of him was his belief that the Library
of Congress has the right to give their award to anyone they choose.
Everyone is gathered here today
because Denis Johnson was an extraordinary writer,
and because he defended freedom, even when he didn't approve of it.
[inaudible]
[ Applause ]
>> Robert Newlen: Nicole, we have a gift from the Library of Congress.
This is a notebook of all the citations-- excuse me--
of the tributes that we heard today and others,
and we knew the Johnson family would want
to have a permanent copy of this.
So, we present it to you.
>> Nicole Aragi: Thank you.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Thank you so much.
I've lost it.
I've lost his award.
[ Applause ]
>> Robert Newlen: Nicole, thank you so much.
And, thanks to all of you who have joined us in remembering one
of America's greatest writers.
We at the Library are also thankful we had the opportunity
to award him our highest honor in fiction,
and we hope you will help us keep his work alive into the future.
We also hope you will take the opportunity to hear the wealth
of other voices we have here today at the National Book Festival,
a testament to the power of writing.
Thank you so much.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
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