Delany, Samuel R. (b. 1942), novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, editor, essayist, educator, director, former folk singer, lecturer, script writer for comic books, and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction, the Pilgrim Award for excellence in science fiction criticism (1985), and the Bill Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Excellence in Gay and Lesbian Literature (1993). Delany has written criticism using the aliases K. Leslie Steiner and S. L. Kermit.

Samuel R. Delany was the first highly visible and extraordinarily successful African American author to adopt the “marginal” subgenre of science fiction and make it his special province, both as a creator and a critic. A Harlem native, “Chip” Delany was the only son of Samuel R. Delany, Sr., and Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, owners of Levy and Delany, a Harlem funeral parlor. His background provided the gifted young Delany with rich and varied experiences despite strained relations with his father, problems at school largely caused by an undiagnosed dyslexia, various experiments with sexuality, and psychiatric counseling sessions. At home he studied both the violin and the guitar; he read a variety of books including classical mythology, the works of diverse African American authors, and science fiction and fantasy stories. His summers were spent in racially integrated upstate New York youth camps, and he kept a journal from childhood. From 1947 to 1956, Delany attended Manhattan's private and progressive Dalton Elementary school, where he interacted with white upper-class children and adopted the “liberal-Jewish world view,” to which, as he noted in a 1986 Science Fiction and Criticism interview, he still subscribes. In 1956 he enrolled in the public Bronx High School of Science (BHSS), where he excelled in math and science. At BHSS he met Jewish poet and child prodigy Marilyn Hacker; they married in 1961, separated in 1975, and divorced in 1980. In 1960, and from 1962 to 1963, he attended New York's City College. Delany's recollections of the pleasures, stresses, textures, and tensions of his childhood were metaphorically summarized for authors Michael Peplow and Robert Bravard (Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962–1979, 1980) as “a virtually ballistic trip through a socio-psychological barrier of astonishingly restrained violence.”

Called variously a child prodigy, a boy wonder, and the wunderkind of science fiction, Delany began to write when he was quite young. As a child, he had been introduced to the genre by parents, campmates, schoolmates, or friends discussing Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein tales. Subsequently, he came to appreciate the works of Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and Arthur C. Clarke. As a preteen he had penned sword-and-sorcery fantasies in his journals; as an adolescent he wrote several unpublished novels; and at nineteen, he published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962).

Since his debut as a published writer Delany has written eighteen novels; three short story collections, Driftglass, Distant Stars, and Driftglass/Starshards; and two memoirs, including the extended autobiographical essay “Heavenly Breakfast” (1979), focused largely on his experiences in a San Francisco commune in 1967–1968, and The Motion of Light in Water (1988), a fuller autobiographical statement treating his life in New York and his development as an artist and writer from 1957 to 1965. In addition, he produced five collections of critical essays focused on science fiction, and in 1994, published Silent Interviews, a collection of written interviews that had appeared in a variety of journals; the subtitle, On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction and Some Comics, indicates the breadth of Delany's interests as a fiction writer, essayist, and critic.

Delany's early novels, from Jewels and his The Fall of the Towers trilogy (1963–1965), through The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Babel 17 (1966), and The Einstein Intersection (1967, originally to be called A Fabulous, Formless Darkness) to Nova (1968) can be characterized as “space opera.” That is, while creating his original tales in far more “literary language” than was typical, and weaving into his plots heroic artists/outcasts as protagonists who were frequently black and/or female, the stories also adopted many of the conventions associated with formulaic science fiction. The settings were exotic, the action occurred in the distant future, and the accent fell on technology: spaceships, computers, aliens, intergalactic battle. His later novels, beginning with The Tides of Lust (1973, also published as Equinox), Dhalgren (1975), Triton (1976), and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), were more complex, more challenging, more anthropologically grounded with a more sophisticated narrative structure, a more theoretical underpinning, and a much greater allusive poetic density. Yet from his early science fiction to that of his later period, the essential topography of Delany's tales remained consistent. Issues of race, gender, freedom, desire, language, mythology, sexuality, semiotics, signs, slavery, psychology, and power persisted in his fictions. Also at issue in virtually all of his stories is his fascination with both literary and linguistic theory and historical linguistics.

The 1980s saw Delany devote most of his energy to the even more marginal form connected to science fiction called fantasy fiction or sword and sorcery. The Return to Neveryon series (1979–1987) consists of four volumes—Tales of Neveryon (1979), Neveryona: Or the Tale of Signs and Cities (1983), Flight from Neveryon (1985), and The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987)—interconnected “prehistorical” tales. As densely allusive and metaphorically postmodern as his later science fiction novels, the tales tell the stories of developments in a prehistoric empire with a preindustrial society. As central to each tale as the issues previously cited are Delany's depictions of political intrigue and the movement of a society from a barter to a cash economy. Already stylistically sophisticated, the intricacies of the Neveryon series are further complicated by Delany's deft blending of fiction and fact through the appended fictive critical voices of S. L. Kermit and K. Leslie Stein. Additionally, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” in Flight from Neveryon, juxtaposes against the plot line entries from Delany's journals regarding the spread of AIDS in New York City.

Almost from the inception of his career Delany has been considered by various reviewers to be one of the most “artistic,” “accomplished,” “interesting,” “gifted,” “intelligent,” “challenging,” and “literate” writers in science fiction. Although often erroneously associated with science fiction's mid-1960s New Wave group, a primarily English phenomenon whose authors published in the journal New Worlds, and whose stories were largely set in the near future, Delany has insisted that he belongs more appropriately to its American counterpart, that group of writers associated with Harlan Ellison and the series of Dangerous Visions (1967) anthologies he edited. In 1999, Delany published Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York.

In “Toto, We’re Back,” a 1986 interview first published in the Cottonwood Review and subsequently reprinted in Silent Interviews, Delany addressed the issue of labeling and marginality he has confronted as an African American writer of science fiction. “The constant and insistent experience I have had as a black man, as a gay man, as a science fiction writer in racist, sexist, homophobic America, with its carefully maintained tradition of high art and low, colors and contours every sentence I write.” Delany's bold insistence on his multiple identities helped create for science fiction a broader audience and helped to generate additional African American contributors to the field.

Bibliography

• George Slusser, The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered As a Writer of Semi-Precious Words, 1977.
• Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, 1978.
• Peter S. Alterman, “Samuel R. Delany,” in DLB, vol. 8, Twentieth-Century American Science Fiction Writers, eds. David Cowart and
• Thomas L. Wymer, 1981, pp. 119–128.
• E. F. Bleider, ed., Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, 1982.
• Jane Branham Weedman, Samuel R. Delany, 1982.
• Sandra Y. Govan, “Samuel R. Delany,” in DLB, vol. 33, Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, eds. Thadious M. Davis and
• Trudier Harris, 1984, pp. 52–59.
• Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction ofLeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and
• Samuel R. Delany, 1987.
• Samuel R. Delany, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose”, interview by Mark Derry, South Atlantic Quarterly 92.4 (Fall 1993): 775–778.
• Sylvia Kelso, “‘Across Never’: Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon Cycle,” Science Fiction Studies 24:2 (72) (July 1997): 289–301.
• Michael Bronski, “Samuel Delany: Ghosts of Times Square,” Publishers Weekly 246:28 (July 12 1999): 68–69

Sandra Y. Govan

African American intellectual Martin Robinson Delany (1812-1885), a journalist, physician, army officer, politician, and judge, is best known for his promotion before the Civil War of a national home in Africa for African Americans.

Martin Delany was born free in Charlestown, Va., on May 6, 1812. His parents traced their ancestry to West African royalty. In 1822 the family moved to Chambersburg, Pa., to find a better racial climate. At the age of 19 Martin attended an African American school in Pittsburgh. He married Kate Richards there in 1843; they had 11 children.

In 1843 Delany founded one of the earliest African American newspapers, the Mystery, devoted particularly to the abolition of slavery. Proud of his African ancestry, Delany advocated unrestricted equality for African Americans, and he participated in conventions to protest slavery. Frederick Douglass, the leading African American abolitionist, made him coeditor of his newspaper, the North Star, in 1847. But Delany left in 1849 to study medicine at Harvard.

At the age of 40 Delany began the practice of medicine, which he would continue on and off for the rest of his life. But with the publication of his book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852; repr. 1968), he began to agitate for a separate nation, trying to get African Americans to settle outside the United States, possibly in Africa, but more probably in Canada or Latin America. In 1854 he led a National Emigration Convention. For a time he lived in Ontario. Despite his bitter opposition to the American Colonization Society and its colony, Liberia, Delany kept open the possibility of settling elsewhere in Africa. His 1859-1860 visit to the country of the Yorubas (now part of Nigeria) to negotiate with local kings for settling African Americans there is summarized in The Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861; repr. 1969).

When Delany returned to the United States, however, the Civil War was in progress and prospects of freedom for African Americans were brighter. He got President Abraham Lincoln to appoint him as a major in the infantry in charge of recruiting all-African American Union units.

After the war Delany went to South Carolina to participate in the Reconstruction. In the Freedmen's Bureau and as a Republican politican, he was influential among the state's population, regardless of race. In 1874 he narrowly missed election as lieutenant governor. In 1876, as the Republicans began losing control of the state, Delany switched to the conservative Democrats. Newly elected governor Wade Hampton rewarded him with an important judgeship in Charleston. As a judge, Delany won the respect of people of all races. In 1878 he helped sponsor the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, which sent one ill-fated emigration ship to Africa. The next year his The Principia of Ethnology argued for pride and purity of the races and for Africa's self-regeneration.

When his political base collapsed in 1879, Delany returned to practicing medicine and later became a businessman in Boston. He died on Jan. 24, 1885.

Further Reading

A recent biography of Delany is Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany:The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (1971). A contemporary account is Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868; repr. 1969). William J. Simmons, Men of Mark (1968), includes a biographical sketch. For the significance of Delany's black nationalist thought before the Civil War see Howard H. Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement 1830-1861 (1970).

writer

Personal Information

Born April 1, 1942, in New York, NY; son of Samuel Ray (a funeral director) and Margaret Carey (a library clerk; maiden name, Boyd) Delany; married Marilyn (a poet) Hacker, August 24, 1961 (divorced, 1980); children: Iva Alyxander.
Education: Attended City College (now City University of New York), 1960-63.

Career

Writer; State University of New York at Buffalo, Butler professor of English, 1975; University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, Center for Twentieth-Century Studies, senior fellow, 1977; Cornell University Society for the Humanities, senior fellow, 1987; University of Massachusetts--Amherst, professor of comparative literature, 1988--. Director and editor of short films Tiresias, 1970, and The Orchid, 1971.

Life's Work

As an African American raised in Harlem and educated in some of the most prestigious schools in New York City, Samuel R. "Chip" Delany has to his credit more than 20 novels and numerous collections of short stories, memoirs, and critical essays on the writing of science fiction. Since the 1962 publication of The Jewels of Aptor when he was 20 years old, Delany has been increasingly recognized as one of the stylistic pioneers of science fiction writing; his short stories and novels have received many honors, including the distinguished Hugo and Nebula awards. Author Felice Picano, writing in Publishing Triangle, noted that it is "difficult to assess Delany's influence upon science fiction writers and readers and equally difficult to assess how deeply and widely he has influenced all of literature's openness to the world of gay men and to people of color."

Delany was born in Harlem, New York, in 1942 to parents who were prominent in the Harlem community. Samuel R. Delany, Sr., owned Levy and Delany Funeral Associations; his wife, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a licensed funeral director and worked as a clerk in the New York Public Library. The Delany family's financial security provided for Samuel, Jr.'s education at the predominantly white Dalton Elementary School, where he was taken each morning in his father's chauffeured black Cadillac.

Although young Delany suffered from dyslexia, it was not diagnosed properly until he was in high school; as a result, he was given remedial assignments at Dalton. Throughout his early schooling, Delany moved between two worlds. His friends in Harlem came from working-class backgrounds while his friends at Dalton were from some of the most prominent families in New York City. During his last year at Dalton, Delany was voted most popular in his class. He spent his childhood summers at private camps and at his family's summer home in Hopewell Junction.

When Delany graduated from Dalton in 1956, he attended Bronx High School of Science (BHSS). There he began publishing his prize-winning short stories in the school magazine, Dynamo, and completed many unpublished novels. While at BHSS he concentrated on math and physics, but he was also interested in music and the arts, writing a complete violin concerto when he was 14; playing the guitar; and studying acting and ballet. At BHSS Delany met poet Marilyn Hacker, whom he would marry in 1961. They both won numerous high school literary awards and coedited Dynamo. He continued writing and in 1960, received a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Vermont, where he met Robert Frost. Frost advised the young writer, "Do it your own way. Don't let anyone else tell you how to do it."

In August of 1961 Delany and Hacker travelled to and wed in Detroit to avoid New York's age-of-consent law requiring parental permission for parties under a specified age and the miscegenation law prohibiting marriage between whites and other races. That fall Delany enrolled in the City College of New York but dropped out the following spring. Through Hacker's encouragement and her position as a science fiction editor for Ace Books, The Jewels of Aptor, on which Delany had been working, was published in 1962. In this work, Delany begins his first experimentation with mythic form: the novel generally follows a quest structure patterned after the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts.

Delany's exploration into the way myth functions to shape cultural perceptions would characterize much of his later fiction. Throughout the 1960s, Delany published eight more novels. Working at such a frenzy eventually took its toll, however; in the summer of 1964, Delany was hospitalized for general disorientation, hallucinations, and nervous exhaustion at Mount Sinai Hospital. Afterward, he began to work at a slower pace, breaking to play guitar and sing in Greenwich Village cafes. In fact, the as of yet undiscovered Bob Dylan, who went on to become one of the most respected figures in folk and rock--once opened for one of Delany's performances.

In 1965 Delany travelled to Europe and Turkey, and in 1966, he spent a month in Texas working on shrimp boats. By the following year he had published two Nebula Award-winning novels: Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. Commenting in Science Fiction Writers, Douglas Barbour found these first novels "colorful, exciting, entertaining, and intellectually provocative to a degree not found in most genre science fiction." He listed how these works "begin the exploration of those literary obsessions that define [Delany's] oeuvre: problems of communication and community; new kinds of sexual/love/family relationships; the artist as a social outsider...; cultural interactions and the exploration of human social possibilities these allow; archetypal and mythic structures in the imagination."

In 1967, Delany moved into the Heavenly Breakfast commune and began writing music for the group's rock band. Resuming his former prolificacy, he also wrote and directed two short films, "Tiresias" and "The Orchard"; authored movie, record, and film reviews; composed essays on other writers of science fiction; and started drafting a new novel. The result, 1968's Nova, could, in many ways, be considered the "summation of [his] career up to that time," according to Barbour, who called the novel "one of the grandest space operas ever written." Jane Weedman showed in her biography, Samuel R. Delany, that the conflict among three groups competing for Illyrion, or fuel during a galactic fuel shortage exemplified Delany's concern with "how technology changes the world and philosophies for world survival." Nova earned Delany the titles "renaissance man" of science fiction, and even, according to some, "the best science fiction writer in the world."

During 1970, Delany and Hacker coedited four issues of Quark, a new journal of "speculative fiction" containing poetry, art, literary criticism, and science fiction. He also began writing stories for Wonder Woman comics. In 1971, Driftwood, a collection of short stories, was published, and in 1973, Delany published his pornographic novel, The Tides of Lust. His personal life was equally eventful. In December of 1972, Delany joined Hacker in London, where their daughter, Iva Alyxander Hacker-Delany, was born in 1974. The following year, Hacker and Delany separated, but did not actually divorce until 1980.

In 1975 Delany became Butler Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Two years later, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction was published. The work was Delany's decade-long accumulation of essays on science fiction writing. His experiences at the Heavenly Breakfast commune were published in 1979 as Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love. Those escapades also made formed the basis for his controversial novel Dhalgren.

Dhalgren, first published as a "Frederick Pohl" selection by Bantam Books in 1975, was written over a seven-year period marked by many interruptions. Writing for the Washington Post, Somtow Sucharitkul recalled that the book "was the most vehemently debated science fiction novel of the mid-1970s," condemned by "traditionalists" for its "apparent lack of plot" and "self-indulgence." Centering on the adventures of a nameless, amnesiac poet/criminal-protagonist in the nightmarish fictional city of Bellona, Dhalghren stirred an ongoing debate over whether the 800-page-plus mythological novel was properly labeled science fiction.

From the incomplete sentence that begins the book, Delany's "dissolving landscape," "ambiguous characters," and "freakish events" are "presented as having a reality (of some kind) outside the author's mind," in the words of critic Gerald Jonas. That "reality" exists on an earth where the contemporary principles of science have been substituted for no rules--or rules that human beings cannot understand. As Jonas observed in the New York Times Book Review, "the premonitions of subatomic physics and cosmology are given flesh." Jonas compared Dhalgren to novelist James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both of which are fragmented, stream-of-consciousness works. While Jonas believed Delany's echoing of Joyce "flagg[ed] his intent [and] proclaim[ed] the standards he wishes to be judged by," he also chastised Delany, stating, " Dhalgren is precisely the kind of book that most people turn to science fiction to get away from."

The Black American Literature Forum' s Sandra Y. Govan highlighted the novel's autobiographical elements: "Most of the city [of Bellona] operates on a quasi-communal model, drawn from Delany's intimate knowledge of commune and extended family life." Govan also called attention to the similarities between the protagonist, dubbed the Kid, and Delany himself: "Kid, the psychologically wounded poet-protagonist, is a distorted reflection of Delany. Like Delany, he has been a wanderer, and he keeps a writer's journal. Like Delany, he uses poetry to distill meanings ... and like Delany, the Kid participates in various kinds of sexual activity, all sanctioned by the social mores of the city and by its communal structure." Other autobiographical elements include mental breakdown and the division of society along racial lines.

In many of his novels, Delany depicts characters who are physically or psychologically damaged--creative artists existing on the periphery of society: the poet Rydra Wong in Babel-17, the novelist Katin in Nova, the musician Lo Lobey in The Einstein Intersection, and the Kid in Dhalgren. He also portrays black and mixed-blood characters, explaining that he wants to "write about worlds where being black mattered in different ways from the ways it matters now." To Delany, the racial elements of his novels ae unavoidable. While Govan believed Delany's black and mixed-blood characters provide him with a "method of grappling with his own position as a black American writer," she also commented on the way his African American characters "punctuate his social criticism of our present" as well as "attest to black survival in the future."

Govan opined that Delany's black characters are not only "memorable," but that his novels "affirm the diversity and vitality of black life." In Dhalgren, for example, black characters range from Reverend Amy Taylor, a black evangelical minister who services her community by supplying physical and spiritual food through the Evening Aid Program for the hungry and her moralistic preaching, to George Harrison, an alleged rapist whose sexual prowess grows to mythic proportions in Bellona. Govan concluded that "other science-fiction writers may have tried to omit or obliterate black folk in their versions of the future, but in Samuel Delany's speculative world a black consciousness is and black folk are an insistent presence."

Similar to his examinations of racial identity, Delany's The Tides of Lust began his serious exploration of sexuality and pornography. Proctor--a protagonist sometimes referred to as a Faustian, or spiritually distraught Delany--tells us that human beings have created three systems for "effecting the oblivion necessary for sanity": religion/ethics, the erotic, and work. The artist is the only one "free enough to indulge in all three--religious, erotic, and ergonic--simply to fulfill his calling."

Triton, published in 1976, three years after The Tides of Lust, featured a sexual utopia that accepts a variety of sexual behaviors, including sex-change operations and "refixations" to alter sexual preference. Weedman offers that in this novel Delany criticizes "sexual persecution against women, ambisexuals, and homosexuals." Beginning in 1979, Delany began publishing his Neveryon series, which presented homosexual themes. Delany called the novels "experimental," telling author and critic Felice Picano that he was attempting to "subvert" the "sword and sorcery" fantasy genre while at the same time "making its covert homosexuality and sadomasochistic current more overt and conscientious."

The publishing industry denounced his motives and Delany's continued openness about homosexuality, especially the AIDS novella, "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" in 1985's Flight From Neveryon, "made traditional readers of sword and sorcery pretty uncomfortable," Delany admitted, "though it delighted others." It also caused major book store chains to temporarily discontinue carrying Delany's works and marked the end of his association with Bantam. After an extensive letter-writing campaign in the gay press, Delany's books were "rescued" and republished by Wesleyan University Press in the United States and HarperCollins/Grafton Books in England.

In 1988, Delany published The Motion of Light in Water. Subtitled Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, this autobiographical work focused on the author's early sexual ambivalence and his ultimate acknowledgement and acceptance of his own homosexuality while living with Hacker in the early 1960s. Author Thomas M. Disch described the memoir in American Book Review, as "representative of its era" and suggested that in this work readers will find the source for Delany's "fictive alter-egos."

Delany has made his literary reputation by transgressing conventional boundaries in the world of contemporary literature and science fiction. Despite the controversy, even Dhalgren and Triton were later judged as innovative texts in Delany's oeuvre. James Barbour, in an article for Foundation, assessed him as "not only a gifted writer ... [but] one of the most articulate theorists of s[cience] f[iction] to have emerged from the ranks of its writers ... open[ing] up critical discussions of sf as a genre, forcefully arguing its great potential as art.'

Delany described his belief in the power of the imagination, telling Picano that "gay, straight, black, white ... all we can do is look closely, write carefully." He added that "what we look at doesn't have to be out there in the real world.... It can be an imaginary situation we choose to observe as easily as [a] real one. In that case the integrity of an observation becomes one with the imagination.... And we can pretty much forget about everything else."

Awards

Nebula Awards, Science Fiction Writers of America, for best novel, 1966, for Babel-17, and 1967, for The Einstein Intersection, for best short story, 1967, for "Aye and Gomorrah," and for best novelette, 1969, for "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"; Hugo Award for best short story, Science Fiction Convention, 1970, for "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"; Pilgrim Award, Science Fiction Research Association, 1985; Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Literature, 1993.

Works

Writings

• Science fiction The Jewels of Aptor (abridged edition; bound with Second Ending by James White), Ace Books, 1962; with an introduction by Don Hausdorff, Gregg Press, 1976.
• Captives of the Flame (first novel in trilogy: bound with The Psionic Menace by Keith Woodcott), Ace Books, 1963; revised edition published as Out of the Dead City, Sphere, 1968.
• The Towers of Toron (second novel in trilogy; bound with The Lunar Eye by Robert Moore Williams), Ace Books, 1964; revised edition, Sphere, 1968.
• City of a Thousand Suns (third novel in trilogy), Ace Books, 1965; revised edition, Sphere, 1969.
• The Ballad of Beta-2 (bound with Alpha Yes, Terra No! by Emil Petaja), Ace Books 1965; with an introduction by David G.
• Hartwell, Gregg Press, 1977.
• Empire Star (bound with The Three Lords of Imeten by Tom Purdom), Ace Books, 1966; with an introduction by Hartwell, Gregg Press, 1977.
• Babel-17, Ace Books, 1966; published with an introduction by Robert Scholes, Gregg Press, 1976.
• The Einstein Intersection, abridged edition, Ace Books, 1967.
• Nova, Doubleday, 1968.
• The Fall of the Towers (trilogy; contains Out of the Dead City, The Towers of Toron, and City of a Thousand Suns ), Ace Books, 1970; with an introduction by Joseph Milicia, Gregg Press, 1977.
• Driftglass: Ten Tales of Speculative Fiction, Doubleday, 1971.
• The Tides of Lust, Lancer Books, 1973.
• Dhalgren, Bantam, 1975; with an introduction by Jean Mark Gawron, Gregg Press, 1978.
• The Ballad of Beta-2 [and] Empire Star, Ace Books, 1975.
• Triton, Bantam, 1976.
• Empire: A Visual Novel, illustrations by Howard V. Chaykin, Berkley Books, 1978.
• Distant Stars, Bantam, 1981.
• Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Bantam, 1984.
• The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction, Bantam, 1986.
• The Star Pits (bound with Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo by John Varley), Tor Books, 1989.
• The Fly at Ciron, Incunabula, 1992.
• The Mad Man, Masquerade Books, 1994.
• "Return to Neveryon" Series Tales of Neveryon, Bantam, 1979.
• Neveryona: or, The Tale of Signs and Cities, Bantam, 1983.
• Flight From Neveryon, Bantam, 1985.
• The Bridge of Lost Desire, Arbor House, 1987.

Other

• The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, 1977, revised edition, Berkley Publishing, 1978.
• The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch--"Angouleme" (criticism), Dragon Press, 1978.
• Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (memoir), Bantam, 1979.
• Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Dragon Press, 1984.
• The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science-Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, Arbor House, 1988.
• Wagner/Artaud: A Play of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Critical Fictions, Ansatz Press, 1988.
• Straits of Messina (essays), Serconia Press, 1989.
• Also author of scripts for short films Tiresias, 1970, and The Orchid, 1971; author of scripts for Wonder Woman (television series), 1972, and for The Star Pit (radio play based on his short story of the same title); editor (with wife, Marilyn Hacker), Quark, 1970-71; contributor to numerous anthologies and periodicals.

Further Reading

Books

• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 8
• Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers, 1981, Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, 1984.
• Kostelanetz, Richard, editor, American Writing Today, Whitson, 1991.
• McCaffery, Larry, and Linda Gregory, editors, Alice and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s , University of Illinois Press, 1987.
• McEvoy, Seth, Samuel R. Delany, Ungar, 1984.
• Platt, Charles, editor, Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, Berkley Books, 1980.
• Slusser, George Edgar, The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of Semi-Precious Words, Borgo, 1977.
• Weedman, Jane Branham, Samuel R. Delany, Starmont House, 1982.

Periodicals

• American Book Review, January 1989.
• Black American Literature Forum, summer 1984, pp. 43-8.
• Extrapolation, May 1971, pp. 86-93; May 1978, pp. 132-37; fall 1982, pp. 221-34; summer 1983, pp. 116-29; winter 1989; fall 1989.
• Foundation, March 1975, pp. 105-21.
• Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1975; October 1977, pp. 6-33; January 1979, pp. 45-9; June 1980; May 1989.
• New York Times Book Review, February 16, 1975; March 28, 1976; October 28, 1979, p. 16; February 10, 1985, p. 15.
• Publisher's Weekly, January 29, 1988; October 19, 1992.
• Publishing Triangle, spring 1994.
• Riverside Quarterly, July 1971, pp. 12-19; no. 5, 1972, pp. 12-18.
• Science Fiction Studies, March 1977, pp. 25-34; November 1979, pp. 249-62; November 1981; July 1987; November 1990.
• Voice Literary Supplement, October 1981, p. 8; February 1985.
• Washington Post, August 30, 1981, p. 6.
• Washington Post Book World, January 19, 1975; January 27, 1985, p. 11; August 25, 1991.

— Mary Katherine Wainwright

For more information on Martin Robison Delany, visit Britannica.com.

(1812-1885), abolitionist, author, and politician. A nineteenth-century Afro-American leader, Delany was a gadfly of many talents and considerable controversy. He is principally remembered as an early black nationalist and an architect of emigration to Africa, endeavors that have obscured the many other remarkable features of his career.

Delany was born free in Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of a slave and a free black woman. He grew up knowing his African ancestry; one of his grandfathers was a Mandingan prince and the other a Golah village chieftain. Delany achieved a solid education in Pittsburgh, where his family had moved in 1831. There he gained his first experience in abolitionism, temperance reform, and the Underground Railroad. In 1843 he married Catherine Richards, the daughter of a member of the Pittsburgh black elite; all their seven children were named for famous blacks.

For a short time Delany published a newspaper, the Mystery, and in 1847-1848, he served as coeditor and agent of Frederick Douglass's newspaper, the North Star. His friendship with Douglass became strained over ideology and strategy, prompting Douglass's famous comparison, "I thank God for making me a man, but Delany thanks him for making him a black man." In 1850-1851 Delany attended medical school at Harvard. After white students protested his presence, he was asked to leave, but before this bitter experience he amassed enough knowledge to enable him to practice medicine periodically.

Delany's discouragement with the persistence of slavery and racism prompted him to move his family to Chatham, Ontario, in the 1850s and to organize emigrationist conventions in both the United States and Canada. In 1859 he went to West Africa, touring Liberia and the Niger River valley, investigating sites for colonization, and negotiating a treaty for the use by Afro-American settlers of a portion of Yorubaland (modern Nigeria). The depth of Delany's discontent is captured in his two major writings: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852), a book that recommended emigration for blacks and sketched a nationalist consciousness; and a novel published serially in 1859, Blake, or the Huts of America, the story of a free Afro-Cuban who, after being kidnapped in America, begins to organize an international slave insurrection. Delany was a dedicated activist, but his leadership style was often authoritarian, and his thought was sometimes as rooted in class interests as it was in race. He viewed emigration as a genuinely new start for American blacks, but also as moral regeneration for Africa, to be led by enlightened Afro-Americans.

Delany garnered considerable support for his African venture, but when the Civil War broke out he switched his attention to recruiting black troops in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In 1865 he was commissioned a major in the Union army, the first black field officer in the war. He recruited two regiments of ex-slaves, and at the war's end he stayed in South Carolina, working diligently for the Freedmen's Bureau for three years and then entering state politics. But he became increasingly disenchanted with Radical Reconstruction, especially its political corruption. He then championed southern home rule and eventually became an active supporter of the ex-Confederate, antilabor, white supremacist Wade Hampton, the Democratic candidate for governor of South Carolina. Delany's misadventures in Reconstruction politics found him once again interested in Liberian emigration in the late 1870s. After his death, he remained relatively unknown until young black nationalists in the 1960s, looking for their ideological origins, resurrected the memory of his pre-1861 career.

Bibliography:

Cyril E. Griffith, The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought (1975); NellIrvin Painter, "Martin R. Delany: Elitism and Black Nationalism," in Leon Litwack and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (1988), 149- 171.

Author:

David W. Blight

See also Abolitionist Movement; Black Nationalism; Free Negroes, 1619-1860; Civil War; Freedmen's Bureau; Reconstruction.

(dəlā'nē) , 1812–85, American black leader, b. Charles Town, Va. (now in West Virginia). The son of free blacks, he attended a black school in Pittsburgh and studied medicine at Harvard. He emphasized the practical aspects of black problems. Taking up the cause of emigration (the return of American blacks to Africa), he was largely responsible for the first National Emigration Convention in 1854 and headed an expedition to the Niger valley. In the Civil War he was an army physician. Later he was in the Freedmen's Bureau, served as a trial judge in Charleston, S.C., and lost (1874) the election for lieutenant governor of South Carolina; he was a stern enemy of corruption. His ideas of race appeared in Principles of Ethnology (1879).

Bibliography

See biographies by F. A. Rollin (1868, repr. 1969), D. Sterling (1971), and V. Ullman (1971).

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)