Samuel R. Delany

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Samuel R. Delany (born April 1, 1942) Chip Delany (who knows him) is an African-American writer and literary critic.

His books include fiction (particularly science fiction), memoir, analysis, and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society. Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), Nova, Dhalgren, the Return to Nevèron series, and Through the Valley of Spiders are among his stories.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, About Writing, and eight books of essays are among his nonfiction titles.

Delany was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002 after winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo Awards over the course of his career.

He was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, and Temple University in Philadelphia from January 1975 to their retirement in May 2015.

He received the Kessler Award in 1997 and the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries in 2010.

In 2013, the Science Fiction Writers of America named him as its 30th Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Early life

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. was born on April 1, 1942 and raised in Harlem. Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, a clerk in the New York Public Library system from 1916 to 1995, was a clerk. Samuel Ray Delany Sr. (1906-1960), a boy from Harlem's Levy & Delany Funeral Home, ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home from 1938 to his death in 1960. Sadie and Bessie Delany, the civil rights pioneers, were his aunts. Elsie and Corry in Atlantis: Model 1924, the first novella in his semi-autobiographical collection Atlantis: Three Tales, based on their lives. Henry Beard Delany (1858-1928) was born a slave but he became the first black bishop of Episcopal Church. Clarissa Scott Delany, his aunt and uncle, are among Harlem's most notable relatives.

The family lived in the top two floors of a three-story private house in Harlem's five-story apartment buildings. On the first day of a new summer camp, Camp Woodland, Delany envied children by name and took one for himself, saying "Everybody calls me Chip" when asked his name. Frederik Pohl called him "a person who is never addressed by his family as Sam, Samuel, or some other variation of the name his parents gave him."

Delany attended the Dalton School of Science and spent summers at Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, New York, followed by the Bronx High School of Science, where he was chosen to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program.

Since infancy, Delany has been identified as gay. However, some commentators have characterized Delany as bisexual due to his lengthy 19-year relationship with poet/translator Marilyn Hacker, who was aware of Delany's orientation and has been identified as a lesbian since their separation.

Hacker and Delany's father died of lung cancer in October 1960 and his marriage in August 1961 in New York's East Village neighborhood at 629 East 5th Street. Hacker's intervention (while working as an assistant editor at Ace Books) helped Delany become a published science fiction author by the age of 20, although he wrote it late after dropping out of the City College of New York after one semester.

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Career

"Salt," Delany's first published short story, appeared in Bronx Science's literary journal in 1960. He wrote nine well-respected science fiction books between 1962 and 1968, as well as two award-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and later in Aye and Gomorrah, as well as other fiction [2002]). Delany spent five months in New York, writing The Einstein Intersection, a newspaper published in France, England, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. These locales incorporated multiple aspects of his later work, including the novel Nova and the short stories "Aye, Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net," among others.

Delany and Hacker began to live separately after returning to work; Delany and Hacker, one of the group's founding members, was later discovered to be a founding member of the Central Park Sheiks (the other two members of the band, Susan Schweers and Steven Greenbaum, also known as Heavenly Breakfast (1979). Hacker went to San Francisco and then England after a brief time together. Delany's first eight books with Ace Books from 1962 to 1967, culminating in Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, which were consecutively named as the year's best book by the Science Fiction Writers of America (Nebula Awards). Delany, founded by Algis Budrys as "an earthshaking new kind" of writer, with J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and Roger Zelazny dubbed him "a genius and poet," and Judith Merril's description of him as "an earthshaking new kind" of writer, "The New Thing."

Delany's first short story was published in Worlds of Tomorrow's February 1967 issue, and he earned three more in other journals this year. Four short stories (including the critically lauded "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and Nova were released in mass acclaim (the former by Doubleday, marking Delany's departure from Ace) in 1968. Delany's second major science fiction book didn't appear until Dhalgren (1975).

Delany moved to San Francisco in 1968 to join Hacker, who was already there, and later to London in the interim, before Delany returned to New York in 1971 as a resident of the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village. Delany produced The Orchid, a short film directed by Barbara Wise in 1972. The shot was shot in 16mm with color and sound, and was scored by John Herbert McDowell. Delany was a visiting writer at Wesleyan University's Center for Humanities in November 1972. Delany and Hacker lived in Marylebone, London, from December 1972 to December 1974. He began writing sexual works in earnest and wrote two pornographic books, one of which (Hogg) was unpublished at the time due to its transgressive content. It's been twenty years since it appeared in print.

In 1972, Delany published two issues of Wonder Woman, during a turbulent period in the publication's history when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a shadow agent. The series's scripted issues #202 and #203 were scripted by Delany. He was supposed to write a six-issue story arc that would culminate in a confrontation over an abortion facility, but after Gloria Steinem led a lobbying campaign protesting Wonder Woman's power, it was postponed, denying Delany's involvement. Steinem's feedback was "conveniently used as an excuse" by DC management, according to scholar Ann Matsuuchi.

The million-selling Dhalgren, Delany's eleventh and most popular book, received both literary recognition (from inside and outside the science fiction community) and derision (mostly from within the community). Delany returned to the United States at Fiedler's behest to teach at the University of Buffalo for the spring 1975 semester, ahead of his return to New York City this summer. Delany, who wrote two more major science fiction books (Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand), in the decade after Dhalgren, Delany began to work in fantasy and science fiction criticism for several years. Return to Nevèron, the four-volume collection's overall title and also the title of the fourth and final book, was his main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s. Delany wrote one more fantasy book after the publication of Return to Nevèrny. They Fly at They are a rewritten and expanded version of an unpublished short story Delany wrote in 1962 and published in 1993. This will be Delany's last book in either the science fiction or fantasy genres for many years. Among the works that appeared during this period were his book The Mad Man and a number of his essay collections.

Delany became a professor in 1988. He spent 11 years as an English professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1977) and Cornell University (1987), before moving to Temple University's English Department in January 2001, where he taught until his resignation in April 2015. During the winter quarter of 2014, he served as a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.

He began with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), a collection of critical essays that applied then-nascent literary theory to science fiction studies, and he has written numerous books of analysis, interviews, and essays. Delany's book of paired essays, Time Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), delves into the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and working-class men in New York City's public sex lives.

In 1993, Bill Whitehead received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle.

Dark Reflections, Christopher Stonewall's Book Award winner in 2007, was a winner of the Stonewall Book Award in 2007. Delany, Gentleman, was the subject of a documentary film directed by Fred Barney Taylor in the same year. The film premiered on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. It's the following year, it tied for the Jury Award for Best Documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Delany was also in 2007 as the "Legends of the Village" calendar published by Village Care of New York.

Delany was one of the five judges (along with Andrei Codrescu, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott, and Carolyn See) for the National Book Awards' fiction category in 2010. Delany was the recipient of the Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He was named the Brudner Prize at Yale University in 2013 for his contributions to gay literature. Since 2018, his archive has been housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale, where it is currently being organized. His papers were on file at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center until then.

Delany began a nonexclusive relationship with Dennis Rickett, former a homeless book vendor, in 1991, a documentary by writer and artist Mia Wolff; their courtship is chronicled in Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999). Robert Morales, his comic book writer and proposed literary executor, died in 2013. He retired from teaching at Temple University after 14 years, in 2015. On this birthday, Magnus Books' last science fiction book Through the Valley of Spiders appeared.

Delany is a hero.

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Awards and recognition

• 1985: Pilgrim Award, presented by the Science Fiction Research Association for Lifetime Achievement in the field of science fiction scholarship.
• 1997: David R. Kessler award for LGBTQ Studies at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies
• 2002: Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
• 2010: J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries.
• 2013: Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th SFWA Grand Master
• 2016: Inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
• 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.
• 2021: Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award.
• 2022: World Fantasy Award, Lifetime Achievement
• 2022: Lambda Literary Award, LGBTQ Erotica