Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. was born on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey (Boyd) Delany (1916–1995), was a clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany Sr. (1906–1960), ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of a three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings.
Delany was born into an accomplished and ambitious family. His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany (1858—1928), was born into slavery, but after emancipation became educated, a priest and the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church. Civil rights pioneers Sadie and Bessie Delany were among his paternal aunts. (He drew from their lives as the basis for characters Elsie and Corry in "Atlantis: Model 1924", the opening novella in his semi-autobiographical collection Atlantis: Three Tales.) Other notable family members include his aunt, Harlem Renaissance poet Clarissa Scott Delany, and his uncle, judge Hubert Thomas Delany.[14]
Delany attended the private Dalton School and, from 1951 through 1956, spent summers at Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, New York.[15] He studied at the merit-based Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany's first published short story, "Salt", appeared in Dynamo, Bronx Science's literary magazine, in 1960.[16]
Delany's father died from lung cancer in October 1960. The following year in August 1961, Delany married poet/translator Marilyn Hacker, and the couple settled in New York's East Village neighborhood at 629 East 5th Street. Hacker was working as an assistant editor at Ace Books, and her intervention helped Delany become a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He had finished writing that first novel (The Jewels of Aptor) while 19, shortly after dropping out of the City College of New York after one semester.
Weeks after Delany's return, he and Hacker began to live separately. Delany played and lived communally for five months on the Lower East Side with the Heavenly Breakfast, a folk-rock band whose other members were Susan Schweers, Steven Greenbaum (aka Wiseman), and Bert Lee (later a founding member of the Central Park Sheiks). Delany wrote a memoir of his experiences with the band and communal life, which was eventually published as Heavenly Breakfast (1979). After he and Hacker briefly came together again, she moved to San Francisco. On New Year's Eve in 1968, Delany joined her; they then moved to London. In the summer of 1971 Delany returned to New York, where he lived at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village.
In 1972, Delany directed a short film entitled The Orchid (originally titled The Science Fiction Film in the Latter Twentieth Century), produced by Barbara Wise.[23] Shot in 16mm with color and sound, the production also employed David Wise, Adolfas Mekas, and was scored by John Herbert McDowell.[24] That November, Delany was a visiting writer at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities.[25]
That year, Delany wrote two issues of the comic book Wonder Woman,[26] during a controversial period when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent.[27] Delany scripted issues #202 and #203 of the series.[28] He was initially supposed to write a six-issue story arc that would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic, but the story arc was canceled after Gloria Steinem led a lobbying effort protesting the removal of Wonder Woman's powers, a change predating Delany's involvement.[29] Scholar Ann Matsuuchi concluded that Steinem's feedback was "conveniently used as an excuse" by DC management.[30]
From December 1972 to December 1974, Delany and Hacker lived in Marylebone, London. During this period, Delany began working with sexual themes in earnest and wrote two pornographic works, Equinox (originally published as The Tides of Lust), and Hogg, which was unpublishable at the time due to its transgressive content; it did not find print until 1995.
Delany's eleventh novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975 to both literary acclaim (from both inside and outside the science fiction community) and derision (mostly from within the community). It sold more than one million copies. After a lengthy exchange of letters with Leslie Fiedler, Delany returned to the United States at Fiedler's behest to teach at the University at Buffalo as Visiting Butler Professor of English for the spring 1975 semester. That summer he returned to New York City.
Though he published two more major science fiction novels (Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) in the decade following Dhalgren, Delany began to work in fantasy and science fiction criticism. Beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), a collection of critical essays that applied then-nascent literary theory to science fiction studies, he published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. He was also a visiting fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1977 and the University at Albany in 1978. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was Return to Nevèrÿon, a four-volume series of sword and sorcery tales.
Delany's works in the 1990s included They Fly at Çiron, a re-written and expanded version of an unpublished short story he had written in 1962, and his last novel in either the science fiction or fantasy genres for many years. He also published his novel The Mad Man and several essay collections, including Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), a pair of essays in which Delany drew on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men in New York City. Delany received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1993; he has described this as the award of which he is proudest.[31]
After an invited stay at the artist's community Yaddo, he moved to the English Department of Temple University in January 2001, where he taught until his retirement in April 2015. In 2007, his novel Dark Reflections was a winner of the Stonewall Book Award. That same year Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, directed by Fred Barney Taylor. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, and in 2008, it tied for Jury Award for Best Documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Also in 2007, Delany was the April "calendar boy" in the "Legends of the Village" calendar put out by Village Care of New York.[32]
His science fiction novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was published by Magnus Books on his birthday in 2012. In 2013 he received the Brudner Prize from Yale University, for his contributions to gay literature. The same year, his comic book writer friend and planned literary executor, Robert Morales, passed away.[34] He served as Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago during the winter quarter of 2014.[35] In 2015, the year Delany retired from teaching at Temple University,[36] the Caribbean Philosophical Association awarded him its Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award.[37]
Since 2018, his archive has been housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale, where it is currently being organized. Till then, his papers were housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.[38]
Personal life
As a child, Delany envied children with nicknames. He took one for himself on the first day of a new summer camp, Camp Woodland, at the age of 11, by answering "Everybody calls me Chip" when asked his name.[4] Decades later, Frederik Pohl called him "a person who is never addressed by his friends as Sam, Samuel or any other variant of the name his parents gave him."[4]
Delany's name is one of the most misspelled in science fiction, having been misspelled on over 60 occasions in reviews.[39] Bravard and Peplow (1984), pp. 69–75. His publisher Doubleday misspelled his name on the title page of Driftglass, as did the organizers of Balticon in 1982 where Delany was guest of honor.
Delany has identified as gay since adolescence.[40] However, some observers have described him as bisexual due to his complicated 19-year marriage with poet/translator Marilyn Hacker, who was aware of Delany's orientation and has identified as a lesbian since their divorce.[41]
In 1991, he entered a committed, nonexclusive relationship with Dennis Rickett, previously a homeless book vendor. Their courtship is chronicled in the graphic memoir Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999), a collaboration with the writer and artist Mia Wolff.
Recurring themes in Delany's work include mythology, memory, language, sexuality, and perception. Class, position in society, and the ability to move from one social stratum to another are motifs that were touched on in his earlier work and became more significant in both his later fiction and non-fiction. Many of Delany's later (mid-1980s and beyond) works have bodies of water (mostly oceans and rivers) as a common theme, as mentioned by Delany in The Polymath. Though not a theme, coffee, more than any other beverage, is mentioned significantly and often in many of Delany's fictions.
Writing itself (both prose and poetry) is also a repeated theme: several of his characters— Geo in The Jewels of Aptor, Vol Nonik in The Fall of the Towers, Rydra Wong in Babel-17, Ni Ty Lee in Empire Star, Katin Crawford in Nova, the Kid, Ernest Newboy, and William in Dhalgren, Arnold Hawley in Dark Reflections, John Marr and Timothy Hasler in The Mad Man, and Osudh in Phallos– are writers or poets of some sort.
Delany also makes use of repeated imagery: several characters (Hogg, The Kid (or Kidd) in Dhalgren, and the sensory-syrynx player, the Mouse, in Nova; Roger in "We .. move on a rigorous line") are known for wearing only one shoe; and nail biting along with rough, calloused (and sometimes veiny) hands as characteristics are given to individuals in a number of his fictions. Names are sometimes reused: "Bellona" is the name of a city in both Dhalgren and Triton, "Denny" is a character in both Dhalgren and Hogg (which were written almost concurrently despite being published two decades apart; and there is a Danny in "We ... move on a rigorous line"), and the name "Hawk" is used for five different characters in four separate stories– Hogg, the story "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and the novella "The Einstein Intersection", and the short story "Cage of Brass", where a character called Pig also appears.
Jewels, reflection, and refraction– not just the imagery but reflection and refraction of text and concepts– are also strong themes and metaphors in Delany's work. Titles such as The Jewels of Aptor, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", Driftglass, and Dark Reflections, along with the optic chain of prisms, mirrors, and lenses worn by several characters in Dhalgren, are a few examples of this; as in "We (...) move on a rigorous line" a ring is nearly obsessively described at every twist and turn of the plot. Reflection and refraction in narrative are explored in Dhalgren and take center stage in his Return to Nevèrÿon series.
Following the 1968 publication of Nova, there was not only a large gap in Delany's published work (after releasing eight novels and a novella between 1962 and 1968, his published output virtually stopped until 1973), there was also a notable addition to the themes found in the stories published after that time. It was at this point that Delany began dealing with sexual themes to an extent rarely equaled in serious writing. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox(originally published as The Tides of Lust, a title that Delany does not endorse), The Mad Man, Hogg and Phallos can be considered pornography, a label Delany himself endorses.[43]
Novels such as Triton and the thousand-plus pages making up his four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon series explored in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive– or, in Triton's case, futuristic– society.[44] Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as Atlantis: Three Tales, The Mad Man, and Hogg, Delany pursued these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York and other American cities, now in the Jazz Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, New York private schools in the 1950s, as well as Greece and Europe in the 1960s,[45] and– in Hogg– generalized small-town America.[46]Phallos details the quest for happiness and security by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian.[47]Dark Reflections is a contemporary novel, dealing with themes of repression, old age, and the writer's unrewarded life.[48]
Writer and academic C. Riley Snorton has addressed Triton's thematic engagement with gender, sexual, and racial difference and how their accommodations are instrumentalized in the state and institutional maintenance of social relations.[49] Despite the novel's infinite number of subject positions and identities available through technological intervention, Snorton argues that Delany's proliferation of identities "take place within the context of increasing technologically determined biocentrism, where bodies are shaped into categories-cum-cartographies of (human) life, as determined by socially agreed-upon and scientifically mapped genetic routes."[50]Triton questions social and political imperatives towards anti-normativity insofar that these projects do not challenge but actually reify the constrictive categories of the human. In his book Afro-Fabulations, Tavia Nyong'o makes a similar argument in his analysis of "The Einstein Intersection". Citing Delany as a queer theorist, Nyong'o highlights the novella's "extended study of the enduring power of norms, written during the precise moment—'the 1960s'—when antinormative, anti-systemic movements in the United States and worldwide were at their peak."[51] Like Triton, "The Einstein Intersection" features characters that exist across a range of differences across gender, sexuality, and ability. This proliferation of identities "takes place within a concerted effort to sustain a gendered social order and to deliver a stable reproductive futurity through language" in the Lo society's caging of the non-functional "kages" who are denied language and care.[52] Both Nyong'o and Snorton connect Delany's work with Sylvia Wynter's "genres of being human,"[53] underscoring Delany's sustained thematic engagement with difference, normativity, and their potential subversions or reifications, and placing him as an important interlocutor in the fields of queer theory and black studies.
The Mad Man, Phallos, and Dark Reflections are linked in minor ways. The beast mentioned at the beginning of The Mad Man graces the cover of Phallos.[54]
Delany has also published seven books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterarygenres, comparative literature, and queer studies. He has commented that he believes that to omit the sexual practices that he portrays in his writing would limit the dialogue children and adults can have about it themselves, and that this lack of knowledge can be fatal.[55]
2021: Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for Outstanding Contributions to Fiction, Criticism and Essays on Science Fiction, Literature and Society by the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.[57]
Chapter 90 was inadvertently left out by the publisher, and was later published in Sensitive Skin magazine[71] Since then Delany has self-published a corrected edition on Amazon with a new cover by Mia Wolff, the missing chapter, and many cosmetic corrections.
The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1977; Wesleyan University Press revised edition 2009, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney[86])
The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1978; Wesleyan University Press 2014, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney[87])
Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1984; Wesleyan University Press, 2012, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney[88])
Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions (Ansatz Press, 1988) 0-945195-01-X
1984: Selected Letters (2000) with an introduction by Kenneth R. James, 0-9665998-1-0
In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany. Volume 1, 1957-1969 (2017), edited and with an introduction by Kenneth R. James, 978-0-8195-7089-5. 2018 Locus Award Finalist (non-fiction) [89]
Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), with foreword by Nalo Hopkinson, 9780819578204
Frederik George Pohl Jr. was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led.
Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".
Babel-17 is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany in which the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis plays an important part. It was joint winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1967 and was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1967.
Gene Rodman Wolfe was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He was noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith. He was a prolific short story writer and novelist, and won many literary awards. Wolfe has been called "the Melville of science fiction", and was honored as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.
Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It was nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for a retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1995. It was originally published under the shorter title Triton.
Literary fiction, mainstream fiction, non-genre fiction or serious fiction is a label that, in the book trade, refers to market novels that do not fit neatly into an established genre ; or, otherwise, refers to novels that are character-driven rather than plot-driven, examine the human condition, use language in an experimental or poetic fashion, or are simply considered serious art.
The Mad Man is a literary novel by Samuel R. Delany, first published in 1994 by Richard Kasak. In a disclaimer that appears at the beginning of the book, Delany describes it as a "pornotopic fantasy". It was originally published in 1994, republished and slightly revised in 1996, and republished again with significant changes in 2002 and again in an e-book version with further corrections in 2015. Delany considers the 2015 version the definitive edition.
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Ronald N. Drummond is a writer, editor, and independent scholar.
Phallos (2004) is a novella by American writer Samuel R. Delany, published by Bamberger Books. It was reissued by Wesleyan University Press in 2013.
Return to Nevèrÿon is a series of eleven sword and sorcery stories by Samuel R. Delany, originally published in four volumes during the years 1979–1987. Those volumes are:
The Einstein Intersection is a 1967 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The title is a reference to Einstein's Theory of Relativity connecting to Kurt Gödel's Constructible universe, which is an analogy to science meeting philosophy. Delany's intended title for the book was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness.
Tales of Nevèrÿon is a collection of five sword and sorcery stories by Samuel R. Delany published in 1978. It is the first of the four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon series and contains the stories "The Tale of Gorgik," "The Tale of Old Venn," "The Tale of Small Sarg," "The Tale of Potters and Dragons," and "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers."
Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories is a collection of stories by American writer Samuel R. Delany, published by Vintage Books in 2003. The book is closely based on an earlier collection, Driftglass, which first appeared in 1971. The ten stories contained in Driftglass are all contained in Aye, and Gomorrah, along with five other stories. The stories consist of ten science fiction stories, in the order the writer wrote them, followed by five fantasies, also in chronological order.
The Nebula Awards annually recognize the best works of science fiction or fantasy published in the United States. The awards are organized and awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a nonprofit association of professional science fiction and fantasy writers. They were first given in 1966 at a ceremony created for the awards, and are given in four categories for different lengths of literary works. A fifth category for film and television episode scripts was given 1974–78 and 2000–09, and a sixth category for game writing was begun in 2018. In 2019 SFWA announced that two awards that were previously run under the same rules but not considered Nebula awards—the Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction and the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation—were to be considered official Nebula awards. The rules governing the Nebula Awards have changed several times during the awards' history, most recently in 2010. The SFWA Nebula Conference, at which the awards are announced and presented, is held each spring in the United States. Locations vary from year to year.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2015 is an anthology of science fiction short works edited by American writer Greg Bear. It was first published in trade paperback by Pyr in December 2015.
The Straits of Messina is a 1989 non-fiction collection of essays, in which author and critic Samuel R. Delany discusses his own novels. The essays are published under his own name, and under the pen name K. Leslie Steiner.
1 2 "Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame". Mid American Science Fiction and Fantasy Conventions, Inc. Retrieved March 22, 2013. This was the official website of the hall of fame to 2004.
↑ Delany, Samuel R. "Coming/Out". In Shorter Views (Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
↑ Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath. Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook; Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999; pp. 115–116.
↑ "Though I'm an atheist, I think Santa is a generous, large-hearted image that has lost a lot of its religious baggage. Besides, respecting other folks' religions is a good quality – at least in terms of their good intentions. It's among the primary American values; it's what our country was founded on. " – (December 8, 2009) "Bad Santa", Philadelphia City Paper.
↑ Samuel Delany– Shorter Views– Chapter 13: "Pornography and Censorship"
↑ Fox, Robert Elliot. "The Politics of Desire in Delany's Triton and Tides of Lust." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 141, Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Accessed 12 July 2018. Originally published in Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis, University Press of Mississippi, 1996, pp. 43-61.
↑ Little Jr., Arthur L. "Delany, Samuel R. (1942– )." African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith, 2nd ed., vol. 1, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001, pp. 149-165. Gale Virtual Reference Library, Accessed 12 July 2018.
↑ Hemmingson, Michael. "In the scorpion garden: 'Hogg.'." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 16, no. 3, 1996, p. 125+. Literature Resource Center, Accessed 12 July 2018.
↑ Delany, Samuel (1995). Rabkin, Eric S. (ed.). Stories: An Anthology and an Introduction. Harper Collins College Publishers. pp.342–355. ISBN0060453273. OCLC750610737. Includes study and writing questions for teaching the story "Corona" in undergraduate college writing courses.
↑ An earlier, heavily edited version of this story that was not approved by the author appeared in Callaloo Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 505-523. (Letters From Amherst, Wesleyan UP, 2019, page 131) .
↑ "In The Valley of the Nest of Spiders". Black Clock #7. Spring–Summer 2007.
↑ O'Neil, Dennis, Delany, Samuel R. Delany, John Broome, Gil Kane, Joe Giella, Neal Adams, Frank Giacoia, and Julius Schwartz. Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow: No. 1. Paperback Library, 1972. Print.
General sources
Barbour, Douglas (1979). Worlds Out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany. Frome, Somerset, UK: Bran's Head Books Ltd. ISBN978-0-905220-13-0.
Bravard, Robert S.; Peplow, Michael W. (1984). "Through a glass darkly: Bibliographing Samuel R. Delany". Black American Literature Forum. 18 (2): 69–75. doi:10.2307/2904129. JSTOR2904129.
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