In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. 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.

He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. This includes eleven 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.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. 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.ĭelany 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. His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 19, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories ). 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.ĭelany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. 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.ĭelany 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. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. 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. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem.

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as 'Chip,' is an award-winning American science fiction author.

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