Samuel Delaney: February Portrait of the Month

Samuel R. Delany, New York, NY, 1987

American author, professor, and literary critic, Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) is best known for his science fiction novels, including Babel-17 (1966), The Einstein Intersection (1967), Nova (1968), Dhalgren (1975), and the Return to Nevèrÿon series (1979–87).

Born in New York City and raised in Harlem, his father owned and ran a local funeral home, and his mother was a library clerk for the New York Public Library. Delany’s grandfather was the first African American Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and his aunts were pioneering civil rights activists, Sadie and Bessie Delany, whose adventures inspired two characters in “Atlantis: Model 1924,” the opening novella in his semi-autobiographical collection Atlantis: Three Tales (1995). As a child, Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science. He dropped out of City College of New York after one semester, and by age 20, he published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962).

Although Delany has identified as gay since adolescence, he had a tumultuous, fourteen-year marriage with poet Marilyn Hacker, whom he met in high school; they separated in 1975 and divorced in 1980. Since 1991, he has been in a committed relationship with Dennis Rickett. Throughout his career, recurring themes in Delany’s novels have included mythology, memory, language, sexuality, and perception, while class and social mobility became more significant motifs in his later fiction and non-fiction writings. Even though he never earned a degree, he has held professorships at various universities since 1988 and has been professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia since 2001. He has won four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards for best science fiction works over the course of his career and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won a Stonewall Book Award.