1984: Selected Letters

by Samuel R. Delany, Kenneth R. James (Introduction)

In 1984, Delany takes a lookback at the historical year Orwell never saw and in doing so faces the heights-and depths-of New York publishing. Through 57 letters and documents from the 1984, Delany offers portraits of millionaire parties, avant-garde artistis, porno-house denizens, modern-day gurus, tax auditors, and the early years of Aids in New York City.

Genres: Nonfiction

351 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2000

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Sean Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a Samuel Delany fetish. I have a google alert on the man’s name for Christ’s sake. I have read a bunch of his work, and hope to one day read it all, so I think I can say with some confidence that if you’re interested in Delany and his work, you have to get this book. This is a collection of letters Delany wrote to friends, fans and business acquaintances in the year 1984. He talks about his interests in post structuralism and how it was informing his work, about what movies and films he is seeing, about problems with his partner and in detail about his incredibly risky sex life at the time.

The parts of the book that document Delany’s continued unsafe sex in the cruising scene in New York right when the AIDS epidemic was really getting going are harrowing and Delany should be championed for his honesty in portraying this world. No edits appeared to have been made to these letters so we get what Delany was thinking about AIDS at a time when no one really knew what it was. He thought for a while he might be immune, he thought maybe you couldn’t get it from oral sex, he though a lot of things that turned out to be totally wrong. And reading him talking about how he and his community were thinking about this disease as it was first being discussed gave me chills. With all the unprotected sex Delany had in those days, it is amazing he survived, and we are better off because we have had another twenty five years of a brilliant writer and and we have this book which is an amazing document of a crazy time in downtown New York and a remarkable look into one of my favorite writers life.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodness, I feel ill-equipped to review this one. I found it when searching for queer epistolary writing for a friend's undergrad class, but <10 pages in I texted frantically to tell her that she definitely shouldn't assign this as part of her undergrad syllabus because there's just so darn much cocksucking in porn theatres right from the get-go.

It's a fascinating mix of detailed, frank discussion of the mechanics and social mores of urban gay sex in the 80s (focused on hustling, cruising, and nameless -- but not really anonymous -- encounters in Times Square theaters) + daily life of a dad and writer + thoughts on writing and theory + occasional discussion of race and racism + dishing on fan cons and writers (from Foucault to Joanna Russ) + thoughts on AIDS from the vantage point of an intellectual gay man in NYC in 1984. There's some porn in there, and really a LOT about dealing with galleys and proofreading and Bantam editors, and some (incorrect, we know now) theorizing about HIV/AIDS transmission. It's such an *interesting* read, so deeply embedded in a particular cultural moment that's just utterly foreign to me.

I can think of one reader that I can't WAIT to recommend this to, because she's going to love the hell out of it. But it's *definitely* not for everybody. I'll probably be recommending it enthusiastically to a very narrow band of readers.

[Jed · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a letter in this collection more than halfway through in which Delany outlines a list of things he doesn't talk about much in letters, and muses on the tendency of his correspondence to focus on specific mundanities and gloss over or omit the important things going on in his life. I'm pretty sure he knew when he wrote it that he wanted to publish a collection like this, and I suspect him of orchestrating the placement of that tidbit for maximum narrative effect. There's a lot of positioning for effect in these letters, but his wonderfully frank style keeps it from seeming contrived. In a rundown of the activities taking up his time, he lists "prowling through bookstores and prowling for sex" as one item, a good example of how matter-of-fact he is about almost everything--not emotionless, these letters are bursting with emotion, but in a very straightforward way. That kind of thoroughly sincere melodrama is very appealing to me. I particularly loved the letter about the day he stopped being afraid of AIDS--not everyone is going to be into a collection like this, but I think that part could stand alone very effectively.

[Resistance · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my desert island books, evidence of my deep love for the irascible and pedantic.

[Jeff Youngstrom]

(June 16, 2003)