Darryl Pinckney

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

Darryl Pinckney
Born1953 (age 6768)
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma materColumbia University
GenreNovelist, playwright
Notable worksHigh Cotton (1992)
Notable awardsWhiting Award (1986); Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994)

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.[1]

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.[2]

Awards

Personal life

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)

Essays

  • "England, Whose England?". Granta (16: Science). Summer 1985. (Subscription Required)
  • "Lonely Hearts Club". Harper's. February 2010.
  • "The Ethics of Admiration: Arendt, McCarthy, Hardwick, Sontag". The Threepenny Review. 135. Fall 2013.
  • "Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma". The New York Review of Books. 19 February 2015.

Theatre texts

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

References

  1. "Darryl Pinckney Biography", JRank.org.
  2. "Interview with Darryl Pinckney", On the Media, 19 March 2010.
  3. "Darryl Pinckney | WHITING AWARDS". Whiting.org. Retrieved 9 December 2016.
  4. Gail Lumet Buckley, "TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 : ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD for First Fiction : On 'High Cotton'", Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1992.
  5. Darryl Pinckney page at United Artists.
  6. David Jenkins (18 November 2007). "James Fenton: 21st century renaissance man". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 9 December 2016.
  7. Darryl Pinckney, "Lonely Hearts Club", Harper's Magazine, 8 February 2010.


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