Samuel R. Delany

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Samuel Ray "Chip" Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction novelist and critic, and an African American gay man. He has won the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award four times. He teaches literature and creative writing.[1]

Names

  • Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. - full legal name
  • Chip Delany - common nickname
  • Delany's name is one of the most misspelled in science fiction, with over 60 different spellings in reviews. His publisher Doubleday even misspelled his name on the title page of his book Driftglass as did the organizers of the 16th Balticon where Delany was guest of honor.
  • K. Leslie Steiner (pseudonym)


Biography

Delany was born and raised in Harlem and attended the Dalton School and Bronx High School of Science. His mother (Margaret Carey Boyd Delany) worked as a library clerk, and his father (Samuel Ray Delany) ran a funeral home. Delany's aunts, Sadie and Bessie Delany, were known as the Delany sisters. They both lived to be over 100 years old, and published Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years. Delany based his characters "Elsie" and "Corry", "Atlantis: Model 1924", on his aunts.

Delany and the poet Marilyn Hacker met in 1956 in high school, and were married from 1961 to 1973. They have a daughter, Ivy Hacker-Delany (b. 1974).

Writing

He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels Nova, The Einstein Intersection, Hogg, and Dhalgren.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20, and published six well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass). Dhalgren was published in 1974. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Neveryon series.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black and gay writer, including his Hugo Award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and other essays.

Themes (fiction)

Most of his works deal more explicitly with sexual themes than is common. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox, The Mad Man, Hogg and Phallos could even be considered pornography, a term that Delany himself has endorsed before.

"Recurring themes in Delany’s work include mythology, memory, language, 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 his later fiction and non-fiction, both."[2]


Teaching

He is a professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at Temple University, and is also known in the academic world as a literary critic.

In recent years, Delany has been teaching English, Comparative Literature, and writing. Delany spent 11 years teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York|University at Buffalo, and moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001.


Criticism

He has published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies.

Selected bibliography

Novels

Return to Nevèrÿon series

Short story collections

(Driftglass and Distant Stars include the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Aye, and Gomorrah is a compilation of all of Delany's short fiction, excepting the Nevèrÿon tales.)

Short stories

Critical works

Memoirs and letters

  • Heavenly Breakfast (1979), ISBN 0553127969
  • The Motion of Light in Water (1988, a memoir of his experiences as a young gay science fiction writer; winner of the Hugo Award), ISBN 0877959471
  • Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999, a discussion of changes in social and sexual interaction in New York's Times Square), ISBN 0814719198
  • Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999, an autobiographical comic drawn by Mia Wolff with an introduction by Alan Moore), ISBN 1890451029
  • 1984 (2000), ISBN 0966599810

Other facts

  • The Library of Congress incorrectly recorded his nationality as English.
  • Among Delany's more unusual credits is that he wrote two issues of the comic book Wonder Woman in 1972, during a controversial period in the publication's history when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues #202 and 203 of the series.
  • Delany's story Aye, and Gomorrah was included in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. Ellison gave a short introduction that ironically pointed out how Delany was one of the last straight science fiction authors.

Awards


Further reading

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Interviews
  • "An Interview with Samuel R. Delany" in Callaloo, v.14, n.2 (1991)

Notes

  1. ↑ Substantial portions of the original form of this entry were copied from the Samuel R. Delany entry at the English Wikipedia.
  2. ↑ WEE See You, citing Wikipedia.
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