Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), Nova, Hogg, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic. (from Wikipedia)

Samuel Delany, also known as "Chip,"^[1] was born to a prominent black family 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 successful 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 the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany 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 largely 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 in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City and is currently in medical school.^{[2] [3]}

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. 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.

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

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. He spent 11 years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at 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. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he 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, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Novels

• The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
• The Fall of the Towers, originally published as three separate novels:
  • Captives of the Flame (1963) - also published as Out of the Dead City
  • The Towers of Toron (1964)
  • City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
• The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)
• Empire Star (novella) (1966)
• Babel-17 (1966, Nebula Award)
• The Einstein Intersection (1967, Nebula Award)
• Nova (1968), ISBN 0-553-10031-9
• The Tides of Lust (1973), later reprinted under Delany's preferred title Equinox (1994), ISBN 1-56333-157-8
• Dhalgren (1975), ISBN 0-553-14861-3
• Triton (1976), ISBN 0-553-12680-6, also published as Trouble on Triton
• Empire with Howard Chaykin (1978) a "visual novel" published by Byron Preiss.
• Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), ISBN 0-553-05053-2
• They Fly at Çiron (1993)
• The Mad Man (1994), ISBN 1-56333-193-4
• Hogg (1995), ISBN 0-932511-91-0
• Phallos (novella) (2004), ISBN 0-917453-41-7
• Dark Reflections (2007), ISBN 0-786719-47-8
• Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, (Forthcoming, Summer/Fall 2008)

Return to Nevèrÿon series

Main article: Return to Nevèrÿon (series)

• Tales of Nevèrÿon (short stories) (1979), ISBN 0-553-12333-5
• Neveryóna (novel) (1983), ISBN 0-553-01434-X
• Flight from Nevèrÿon (novellas) (1985), ISBN 0-553-24856-1
• The Bridge of Lost Desire (novellas) (1987), ISBN 0-87795-931-5, revised as Return to Nevèrÿon (1994), ISBN 0-8195-6278-5

Short story collections

• Driftglass (1971)
• Distant Stars (1981, illustrated), ISBN 0-553-01336-X
• The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1983), ISBN 0-553-25610-6
• Driftglass/Starshards (1993), ISBN 0-586-21422-4
• Atlantis: Three Tales (1995), ISBN 0-8195-5283-6
• Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories (2003), ISBN 0-375-70671-2

(All of the above collections except Atlantis include the Nebula Award-winning "Aye, and Gomorrah" and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories—which includes all stories found in both Driftglass and Distant Stars and more—is a compilation of most of Delany's short fiction, excepting the Nevèrÿon tales and the tales from Atlantis.)

Anthologies

• (edited with Marilyn Hacker) Quark/1 (1970, science fiction)
• (edited with Marilyn Hacker) Quark/2 (1971, science fiction)
• (edited with Marilyn Hacker) Quark/3 (1971, science fiction)
• (edited with Marilyn Hacker) Quark/4 (1971, science fiction)
• Nebula Winners 13 (1980, science fiction)

Nonfiction

Critical works

• The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1977)
• The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1978)
• Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1984)
• Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions (Ansatz Press, 1988)
• The Straits of Messina (1989), ISBN 0-934933-04-9
• Silent Interviews (1995), ISBN 0-8195-6280-7
• Longer Views (1996, with an introduction by Kenneth R. James), ISBN 0-8195-6293-9
• Shorter Views (1999), ISBN 0-8195-6369-2
• About Writing (2005), ISBN 0-8195-6716-7

Memoirs and letters

• Heavenly Breakfast (1979, a memoir of a New York City commune during the so-called Summer of Love), ISBN 0-553-12796-9
• 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 0-87795-947-1
• Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999, a discussion of changes in social and sexual interaction in New York's Times Square), ISBN 0-8147-1919-8
• Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999, an autobiographical comic drawn by Mia Wolff with an introduction by Alan Moore), ISBN 1-890451-02-9
• 1984: Selected Letters (2000, with an introduction by Kenneth R. James), ISBN 0-9665998-1-0

Introductions

• BLACK GAY MAN by Robert Reid-Pharr