
Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He 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. 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. 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. He 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.
Series
Books

Return to Nevèrÿon
1987

The American Shore
1978

The Einstein Intersection
1967

The Tides Of Lust
1973

They Fly at Çiron
1993

Babel-17/Empire Star
2001

The Motion of Light in Water
Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
1988

Dark Reflections
2007

Trouble on Triton
1976

Babel-17
1966

Tales of Nevèrÿon
1979

The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction of Samuel R. Delany
1986

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
1999

Out of the Dead City
1963

The Best of the Nebulas
1989

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
1977

Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
2009

Heavenly Breakfast
An Essay on the Winter of Love
1979

Empire Star
1966

Nova
1968

Out of the Ruins
2021

Longer Views
Extended Essays
1996

The Mad Man
1994

Driftglass
1971

Atlantis
Three Tales
1995

The Towers of Toron
1964

The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One
Babel-17, Nova, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
2017

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
2010

The Atheist in the Attic
2018

1984
Selected Letters
2000

Phallos
Enhanced and Revised Edition
2004

American Science Fiction
Four Classic Novels 1968-1969 (LOA #322)
2019

Aye, and Gomorrah
2003

Of Solids and Surds
Notes for Noël Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White
2021

Dhalgren
1975

Quark/4
1971

In Search of Silence
The Journals of Samuel R. Delany, Volume I, 1957-1969
2015

Distant Stars
1981

Quark/1
1970

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
2011

About Writing
Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews
2006

Occasional Views
"More About Writing and Other Essays"
2015

Bread and Wine
1999

Driftglass/Starshards
1991

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
1984

The Jewels of Aptor/Second Ending
1962

Starboard Wine
More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
1984

The Jewels of Aptor
1962

Flight from Nevèrÿon
1985

Silent Interviews
On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics-A Collection of Written Interviews
1994

Neveryóna
1983

The Big Book of Modern Fantasy
2020

City of a Thousand Suns
1965

We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line
1968

Letters from Amherst
Five Narrative Letters
2015

Dark Matter
A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
2000

Hogg
1994

A, B, C
Three Short Novels
2015

The Ballad of Beta 2
1965