With a bounty of awards and honors for his
writing, acting, and activism, Davis, along with
wife Ruby Dee, won the Presidential Medal for
Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 1995. In his
memoir, Davis aptly reflected on the foundation
of his life as an author:
It wasn’t a matter of whether I had the tal-
ent, but of whether I was free enough, strong
enough, bold enough, and confident enough to
use it—to summon up at will, from memory
and imagination, the authority and the power
to assert myself, to stop hiding behind the ready
smile of a free and easy good nature... and dare
to become the man I was meant to be.... Such
is the redemptive power of trying to become an
artist. I couldn’t be an artist unless first I be-
came a man! (Davis and Dee, 397).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davis, Ossie, and Ruby Dee. With Ossie and Ruby: In
This Life Together. New York: Morrow and Co.,
1998.
Hatch, Shari Dorantes, and Michael R. Strickland,
eds. African-American Writers: A Dictionary. Santa
Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2000.
McIntosh, Susan, and Greg Robinson. “Ossie Davis.”
In Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and
History. Vol. 2, edited by Jack Salzman, David Lio-
nel Smith, and Cornel West, 723–724. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Melvin Donalson
Delany, Samuel R. (1942– )
In a publishing career that has lasted more than 40
years, Samuel Delany has come to be recognized
as one of the most significant and original writers
of his generation across an astonishing variety of
genres. After having quickly made his mark in the
world of science fiction, he has gone on to become
an increasingly recognized and esteemed figure in
the worlds of gay and lesbian literature, literary
theory, and, belatedly, African-American literary
culture.
Born April 1, 1942, in New York City to Sam-
uel R. Delany, Sr., and Margaret Carey Boyd, the
owners of a successful Harlem funeral parlor,
Delany was given an education reflecting this rel-
atively privileged background. Attending the ex-
clusive Dalton Elementary School and the Bronx
High School of Science, he was exposed early in
his life to a wide range of artistic and cultural in-
fluences. Despite his homosexuality, in 1961 he
married the brilliant Jewish poet Marilyn Hacker,
whom he had met at Bronx High and with whom
he would edit the science-fiction journal Quark.
Although the marriage would soon evolve into
an unconventional pairing of essentially inde-
pendent creative artists, they would remain mar-
ried until 1975. These varied influences no doubt
shaped the cosmopolitanism and unconvention-
ality that has characterized his writing and may
have contributed to his decision to write outside
of the confines of realism and social protest that
most African-American writers of the period were
deploying. Another element in Delany’s willing-
ness to place himself outside the mainstream of
African-American writing was his awareness and
acceptance of his homosexuality and his commit-
ment to making the radical themes of sexuality
and homosexuality prominent components of
his work.
After publishing his first novel, The Jewels of
Aptor (1962), at age 19 and completing his land-
mark series The Fall of the Towers in 1971, Delany
was almost immediately recognized as both a
prodigy and an important new voice in the field.
Reflecting this recognition by the science-fiction
community, Delany would go on to win four Neb-
ula awards, most notably for the books Babel-17
(1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967), and
two Hugo Awards. In 1979 Delany published Tales
of Neveryon, the first book in his celebrated fan-
tasy series, in which he combines elements of the
often critically castigated sword-and-sorcery genre
with explorations of contemporary issues like AIDS
and feminist theories of gender relations. This
book was followed by Neveryona (1983), Flight
from Neveryon (1985), and The Bridge of Lost De-
sire (1987). In 1984, he published one of his most
acclaimed and academically recognized works of134 Delany, Samuel R.