Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. "Chip" Delany is an American writer and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism, and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society.
His fiction includes Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection ; Hogg, Nova, Dhalgren, the Return to Nevèrÿon series, and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His nonfiction includes Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, About Writing, and eight books of essays. He has won four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002.
From January 1975 to May 2015, he was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and/or Creative Writing at SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Temple University.
In 1997, he won the Kessler Award; further, in 2010, he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th SFWA Grand Master in 2013, and in 2016, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Delany received the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. On October 11, 2025, Delany was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Early life
Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. was born on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Delany, was a clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany Sr., ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until 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 was born into an accomplished and ambitious family of the African-American upper class. His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was born into slavery, but after emancipation became educated, a priest and the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church. Civil rights pioneers Sadie and Bessie Delany were among his paternal aunts. Other notable family members include his aunt, Harlem Renaissance poet Clarissa Scott Delany, and his uncle, judge Hubert Thomas Delany.
Delany attended the private Dalton School and, from 1951 through 1956, spent summers at Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, New York. He studied at the merit-based 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's first published short story, "Salt", appeared in Dynamo, Bronx Science's literary magazine, in 1960.
Delany's father died from lung cancer in October 1960. The following year, in August 1961, Delany married poet/translator Marilyn Hacker, and the couple settled in New York's East Village neighborhood at 629 East 5th Street. Hacker was working as an assistant editor at Ace Books, and her intervention helped Delany become a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He had finished writing that first novel while 19, shortly after dropping out of the City College of New York after one semester.
Career
His next work was the trilogy The Fall of the Towers, followed by The Ballad of Beta-2 and Babel-17; he described his writing in this period, and his marriage to Hacker, in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water. In 1966, while Hacker remained in New York, Delany took a five-month trip to France, England, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. During this period, he wrote The Einstein Intersection. He drew on these locales in several works, including Nova and the short stories "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net". These works received critical praise: Algis Budrys called Delany a genius and poet and listed him with J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and Roger Zelazny as "an earthshaking new kind" of writer, while Judith Merril labeled him "TNT ". Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966 and 1967, respectively."The Star-Pit", Delany's first professional short story, was published by Frederick Pohl in the February 1967 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, and he placed three more in other magazines that year. In 1968, he published four more short stories and Nova. This was published by Doubleday, marking Delany's departure from Ace; it was his last science fiction novel until Dhalgren in 1975.
Weeks after Delany's return, he and Hacker began to live separately. Delany played and lived communally for five months on the Lower East Side with the Heavenly Breakfast, a folk-rock band whose other members were Susan Schweers, Steven Greenbaum, and Bert Lee. Delany wrote a memoir of his experiences with the band and communal life, which was eventually published as Heavenly Breakfast. After he and Hacker briefly came together again, she moved to San Francisco. On New Year's Eve in 1968, Delany joined her; they then moved to London. In the summer of 1971 Delany returned to New York, where he lived at the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village.
In 1972, Delany directed a short film entitled The Orchid, produced by Barbara Wise. Shot in 16 mm with color and sound, the production also employed David Wise, Adolfas Mekas, and was scored by John Herbert McDowell. That November, Delany was a visiting writer at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities.
That year, Delany wrote two issues of the comic book Wonder Woman, during a controversial period when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues No. 202 and No. 203 of the series. He was initially supposed to write a six-issue story arc that would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic, but the story arc was canceled after Gloria Steinem led a lobbying effort protesting the removal of Wonder Woman's powers, a change predating Delany's involvement. Scholar Ann Matsuuchi concluded that Steinem's feedback was "conveniently used as an excuse" by DC management.
From December 1972 to December 1974, Delany and Hacker lived in Marylebone, London. During this period, Delany began working with sexual themes in earnest and wrote two pornographic works, Equinox, and Hogg, which was unpublishable at the time due to its transgressive content; it did not find print until 1995.
Delany's eleventh novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975 to both literary acclaim and derision. It sold more than one million copies. After a lengthy exchange of letters with Leslie Fiedler, Delany returned to the United States at Fiedler's behest to teach at the University at Buffalo as Visiting Butler Professor of English for the spring 1975 semester. That summer he returned to New York City.
Though he published two more major science fiction novels in the decade following Dhalgren, Delany began to work in fantasy and science fiction criticism. Beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a collection of critical essays that applied then-nascent literary theory to science fiction studies, he published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. He was also a visiting fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1977 and the University at Albany in 1978. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was Return to Nevèrÿon, a four-volume series of sword and sorcery tales.
In 1987, Delany was a visiting fellow at Cornell University. The next year, he became a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He held this post for 11 years, before spending a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo.
Delany's works in the 1990s included They Fly at Çiron, a re-written and expanded version of an unpublished short story he had written in 1962, and his last novel in either the science fiction or fantasy genres for many years. He also published his novel The Mad Man and several essay collections, including Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a pair of essays in which Delany drew on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men in New York City. Delany received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1993; he has described this as the award of which he is proudest.
After an invited stay at the artist's community Yaddo, he moved to the English Department of Temple University in January 2001, where he taught until his retirement in April 2015. In 2007, 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, and in 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 2008, his novel Dark Reflections was a winner of the Stonewall Book Award.
In 2010, Delany was one of five judges for the National Book Awards fiction category.
His science fiction novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was published by Magnus Books on his birthday in 2012. In 2013 he received the Brudner Prize from Yale University, for his contributions to gay literature. The same year, his comic book writer friend and planned literary executor, Robert Morales, died. He served as Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago during the winter quarter of 2014. In 2015, the year Delany retired from teaching at Temple University, the Caribbean Philosophical Association awarded him its Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award.
Since 2018, his archive has been housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale, where it is currently being organized. Before that time, his papers were housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.