Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in

Indianapolis, Indiana Indianapolis (), colloquially known as Indy, is the state capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the seat of Marion County. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the consolidated population of Indianapolis and Mari ...

) is an American

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

, playwright, and

essayist An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal ...

Early life

Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in

, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in New York City.

Career

Some of Pinckney's first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson. These included the produced works of '' The Forest'' (1988) and ''

Orlando Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures re ...

'' (1989). Pinckney returned to theatre with '' Time Rocker'' (1995). His first novel was ''High Cotton'' (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America. His second novel was ''Black Deutschland'' (2016), about a young gay black man in Berlin in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Pinckney is also a frequent contributor to the ''

New York Review of Books New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created. New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz Albums and EPs * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator ...

'', ''

Granta ''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and ma ...

'', '' Slate'', and ''

The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper t ...

''. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature. In the 21st century, Pinckney has published two collections of essays on African-American literature. He has expressed his admiration for the writing of the long-running American

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...

soap opera A soap opera, or ''soap'' for short, is a typically long-running radio or television serial, frequently characterized by melodrama, ensemble casts, and sentimentality. The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored ...

, ''

As the World Turns ''As the World Turns'' (often abbreviated as ''ATWT'') is an American television soap opera that aired on CBS for 54 years from April 2, 1956, to September 17, 2010. Irna Phillips created ''As the World Turns'' as a sister show to her other s ...

''.

Awards

*1986, Whiting Award *1992, ''High Cotton'' won the ''Los Angeles Times'' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. *1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the

American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...

Personal life

He is gay. His partner is English poet

James Fenton James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguat ...

; the couple has been together since 1989. Pinckney lives in New York City and

Oxfordshire, England Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

Bibliography

Books

* '' High Cotton'' (novel; 1992) * '' Sold and Gone: African American Literature and U.S. Society'' (2001) * '' Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature'' (2002) * '' Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy'' (2014) * ''Black Deutschland'' (2016) * ''Busted in New York and Other Essays'' (2019; Foreword by

Zadie Smith Zadie Smith FRSL (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, ''White Teeth'' (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor ...

) * ''Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan'' (2022)

Selected essays

* (Subscription Required) * * * * * *

Theatre texts

*(Collaborations with Robert Wilson) ** '' The Forest'' (1988) ** ''

'' (1989) ** '' Time Rocker'' (1995)

References

External links

Darryl Pinckney websiteDarryl Pinckney at the ''New York Review of Books''Profile at The Whiting Foundation
1953 births Living people Writers from Indianapolis African-American novelists 21st-century essayists 20th-century American novelists American gay writers American LGBT novelists 21st-century American novelists LGBT African Americans 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers Novelists from Indiana Columbia College (New York) alumni 20th-century African-American writers 21st-century African-American writers 21st-century LGBT people African-American male writers {{AfricanAmerican-stub