Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany, born on April 1, 1942, in Manhattan, New York, is a prominent science fiction author and scholar known for his imaginative narratives and exploration of complex themes, including sexuality and identity. Raised in Harlem, Delany displayed exceptional literary talent from a young age, attending prestigious schools before briefly enrolling at the City College of New York. His early works, like *The Einstein Intersection* (1967) and *Dhalgren* (1975), are noted for their innovative styles and deep examinations of personal and societal identity, particularly regarding sexual orientation and racial experience.
Delany's writing is characterized by a rich linguistic style and a commitment to introspection, as seen in his autobiographical works such as *The Motion of Light in Water* (1988) and the semi-autobiographical novella *Heavenly Breakfast* (1979). He has candidly explored his experiences as a gay black man, offering insights into both his own life and the broader experiences of marginalized communities. His contributions to literature have been recognized with numerous awards, including induction into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame and the Lambda Literary Award. Continuing to publish into the late 2010s and early 2020s, Delany remains a vital figure in contemporary literature, celebrated for his imaginative storytelling and thoughtful analysis of human experience.
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Subject Terms
Samuel R. Delany
Author
- Born: April 1, 1942
- Place of Birth: New York, New York
Author Profile
Samuel Ray “Chip” Delany Jr. was born in Manhattan, New York City, on April 1, 1942. The only child of Margaret Carey Boyd, a New York Public Library clerk, and Samuel Ray Delany Sr., owner of the Levy & Delany Funeral Home, he was raised in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. An evidently gifted child, Delany attended first the Dalton School, a prestigious preparatory school, and then the Bronx High School of Science. After finishing high school, he briefly attended the City College of New York but did not complete his degree.
Delany’s early science fiction is remarkable for its vivid imagination, pyrotechnic style, and interest in linguistic science. Several essays collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1977) began an analysis of the distinctive ways in which meaning is generated in texts that refer to imaginary worlds. This analysis is a central preoccupation of his academic writing and played a vital part in shaping his later fiction. The Einstein Intersection (1967) is the first of his novels that makes the creator visible within the text and links the process of fictional creation to his parallel life experiences.
The increasing openness of the science-fiction genre allowed Delany to move on to an explicit and very elaborate examination of homosexual identity in Dhalgren (1975). The intense introspective analysis of Dhalgren is inverted in Triton (1976), which extrapolates the personal into the political with flamboyance in its analysis of a future “heterotopia” in which all kinds of sexual identities are readily accommodated and available for sampling. (The novel was later published under the expanded title Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia.)
Delany began to subject his life to an unusually candid and thoughtful analysis. The primary product of this analysis is The Motion of Light in Water (1988), a detailed autobiographical account of his life between 1957 and 1965. The semiautobiographical novella Heavenly Breakfast (1979) deals with an experiment in communal living in the late 1960s. “Citre et Trans,” a short story first published in Driftglass/Starshards (1993), describes a black American writer’s erotic experiences in Greece in the mid-1960s. Silent Interviews (1994) is a collection of dialogues in which Delany responds in detail to various inquisitors. The remarkable fiction “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (in Flight from Nevèrÿon, 1985), which offers a searching, part allegorical, part autobiographical analysis of the advent of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), is the most complex and powerful of his works in this introspective vein.
The hallmark of all of Delany’s self-analytical work is a remarkable frankness, especially in matters of sexuality, although there is nothing self-aggrandizing in his examinations of his own sex life or the imaginary sex lives of characters like him. His curiosity about his experience as a gay black man is utterly scrupulous in its quest for honest expression and true explanation, and his attempts to understand and explain the different experiences of others are marked by great generosity of spirit and critical insight. His occasional adventures in pornography, recounted without embarrassment, demonstrate that his attempts to understand the erotic workings of the human mind are uninhibited by fear of stigmatization.
Although Delany is gay, in 1961 he married poet Marilyn Hacker, who was aware of his orientation. The couple had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, before divorcing in 1980. In 1991, Delany began a long-term relationship with Dennis Rickett, who was homeless when they met; their meeting and early relationship is chronicled in the graphic novel Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999), written by Delany and drawn by Mia Wolff.
Despite his advancing age, Delany published numerous works in the late 2010s and early 2020s. These included The Atheist in the Attic (2018), Big Joe (2021), and the serial This Short Day of Frost and Sun (2022).
Delaney continued to be recognized for his contributions to the literary community. In 2016, Delaney was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. In 2021, he was granted the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award, and the following year he received the Lambda Literary Award.
Bibliography
Anders, Tisa M. “Delany, Samuel Ray, Jr. (1942–).” BlackPast.org. BlackPast.org, 2007–15. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.
Barbour, Douglas. Worlds out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delaney. Frome: Bran’s Head, 1979. Print.
Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” South Atlantic Quarterly 92.4 (1993): 735–78. Rpt. in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Ed. Dery. 1994. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 179–222. Print.
Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Print.
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2000. Print.
Gawron, Jean Mark. Introduction. Dhalgren. By Samuel R. Delany. Boston: Gregg, 1977. Print.
Kelso, Sylvia. “‘Across Never’: Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon Cycle.” Science Fiction Studies 24.2 (1997): 289–301. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.
Lucas, Julian. "How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City." The New Yorker, 3 July 2023, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/samuel-r-delany-profile. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Ungar, 1984. Print.
Peplow, Michael W., and Robert S. Bravard. Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962–1979. Boston: Hall, 1980. Print.
Reid-Pharr, Robert F. “Disseminating Heterotopia” African American Review 28.3 (1994): 347–57. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.
Sallis, James, ed. Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. Print.
Sallis, James, ed. Edmund White / Samuel R. Delany. Spec. issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction 16.3 (1996): 1–219. Print.
Slusser, George Edgar. The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of Semi-Precious Words. San Bernardino: Borgo, 1977. Print.
Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004. Print.
Weedman, Jane Branham. Samuel R. Delany. Mercer Island: Starmont, 1982. Print.