![]() ![]() Delany grew up above his father’s business. His father, who had come to New York from Raleigh, North Carolina, ran Levy and Delany, a funeral home to which Langston Hughes refers in his stories about the neighborhood. Instead, he laughs, and more often than not it is a quiet chuckle expressed mostly in his eyes.ĭelany was born on April 1, 1942, in Harlem, by then the cultural epicenter of black America. Yet he seems hardly bothered by such attempts to figure him out. He is a gay man who was married to a woman for twelve years he is a black man who, because of his light complexion, is regularly asked to identify his ethnicity. Such intrusions are common, because Delany, whose work has been described as limitless, has lived a life that flouts the conventional. “You are famous, I can just tell, I know you from somewhere,” a stranger tells him in the 2007 documentary Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. ![]() His beard, dramatically long and starkly white, is his most distinctive feature. Dressed in what is often his uniform-black jeans and a black button-down shirt, ear pierced with multiple rings-he looks imperial. We sit near the window, and Delany, who is a serious morning person, presides over the city as it wakes. It is a classic greasy spoon that serves strong coffee and breakfast all day. ![]() The first time I interview Samuel Delany, we meet in a diner near his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. Interviewed by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Issue 197, Summer 2011 ![]()
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