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Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist.

Darryl Pinckney
Born	1953 (age 68–69) Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Nationality	American
Education	Columbia University (BA)
Genre	Novelist, playwright
Notable works	High Cotton (1992)
Notable awards	Whiting Award (1986); Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994)
Partner	James Fenton
Website
darrylpinckney.com

Early life

Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.^{[citation needed]}

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 (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, Granta, Slate, and The Nation. 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 soap opera, As the World Turns.[1]

Awards

• 1986, Whiting Award[2]
• 1992, High Cotton won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.[3]
• 1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters[4]

Personal life

He is gay.[5] His partner is English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989.[6] Pinckney lives in New York City and Oxfordshire, England.[7]

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)[8]
• Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (2022)

Selected essays

• "England, Whose England?". Granta (16: Science). Summer 1985. (Subscription Required)
• "Lonely Hearts Club". Harper's. February 2010. February 2010.
• "The Ethics of Admiration: Arendt, McCarthy, Hardwick, Sontag". The Threepenny Review. 135. Fall 2013.
• Pinckney, Darryl (February 19, 2015). "Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma". The New York Review of Books.
• Pinckney, Darryl (March 26, 2020). "Escaping Blackness". The New York Review of Books.
• Pinckney, Darryl (August 20, 2020). "'We Must Act Out Our Freedom'". The New York Review of Books.
• Pinckney, Darryl (November 5, 2020). "A Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". The New York Review of Books.

Theatre texts

• (Collaborations with Robert Wilson)
  • The Forest (1988)
  • Orlando (1989)
  • Time Rocker (1995)

References

External links

• Darryl Pinckney website
• Darryl Pinckney at the New York Review of Books
• Profile at The Whiting Foundation

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