Samuel R. Delany - Life and Career

Life and Career

Samuel Delany, nicknamed "Chip", was born on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and 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's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; he used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella "Atlantis: Model 1924" in his book of semi-autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the 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 and poet Marilyn Hacker met on their first day together in high school in September 1956, and were married five years later in August 1961. Their marriage (which alternatively encompassed periods of cohabitation and separation, experiments in polyamory, and extramarital affairs with men and women conducted by both parties) endured for fourteen years; in 1974, they had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, who spent a decade working in theater in New York City and recently graduated from medical school. Delany and Hacker permanently separated in 1975 and divorced in 1980.

Since 1991, Delany has been in 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 (2000), a collaboration between the writer and artist Mia Wolff. Rickett and Delany currently reside in the walk-up apartment on New York's Upper West Side that he has maintained since 1975.

Delany has identified as a gay man since adolescence, though his complicated marriage with Hacker (who was aware of Delany's orientation and has identified as a lesbian since their divorce) has led some authors to classify him as bisexual.

Upon marrying and the near-concurrent death of Delany's father from lung cancer, he and Hacker settled in New York's East Village neighborhood. Due to the intervention of Hacker (then employed as an assistant editor at Ace Books), Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20, though he actually finished writing that first novel (The Jewels of Aptor) while still only 19 years old, shortly after dropping out of the City College of New York after one semester. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as two prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass and later in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories ). In 1966, with Hacker remaining in New York, Delany took an extended trip to Europe, spending several months in Turkey and Greece. These locales found their way into several pieces of his work at that time, including the novel Nova and the short stories "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net".

After returning from Europe, Delany played and lived communally for six months on the Lower East Side with the Heavenly Breakfast, a folk-rock band that later metamorphosed into the Central Park Sheiks; a memoir of his experiences with the band and communal life was eventually published as Heavenly Breakfast (1979). Between 1962 and 1967, eight of Delany's novels and four short stories were published at a rapid clip; after four short stories (including the critically lauded "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and Nova were published to wide acclaim (the latter by Doubleday, marking Delany's departure from Ace) in 1968 alone, an extended interregnum in publication commenced until the release of Dhalgren (1975), abated only by two short stories, two comic book scripts, and a minor erotic novel, The Tides of Lust (1973). On New Year's Eve in 1968, Delany and Hacker moved to San Francisco, and again to London in the interim, before Delany returned to New York in the summer of 1971 as a resident of the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village; from December 1972 to December 1974, Delany and Hacker cohabited in Marylebone, London. In 1972, Delany was a visiting writer at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. During this period, he began working with sexual themes in earnest and wrote two pornographic works, one of which (Hogg) was considered to be completely unpublishable due to the nature of its content. It would, in fact, be twenty years from the time Delany finished writing the novel before it saw print. 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 eleventh and most popular novel, the million-plus-selling 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). Upon its publication, Delany returned to the United States at the behest of Leslie Fiedler to teach at the University at Buffalo as Butler Professor of English in the spring of 1975, preceding his permanent return to New York City that summer. Though he wrote 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 for several years. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book. Following the publication of the Return to Nevèrÿon series, Delany published one more fantasy novel. Released in 1993, They Fly at Çiron is a re-written and expanded version of an unpublished short story Delany wrote in 1962. This would be Delany's last novel in either the science fiction or fantasy genres for many years.

Although he does not possess a degree, Delany has been a professor at several universities since 1988. Following further visiting fellowships at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (1977), the University at Albany (1978), and Cornell University (1987), he spent 11 years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo, then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. Beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), a collection of critical essays that applies then-nascent literary theory to science fiction studies, he has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In the memoir Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), Delany draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

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. The following year, 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.

In 2010, 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.

His papers are housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

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.