Darryl Pinckney

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

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]

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Some of Pinckney's first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson.^[2] These included the produced works of The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989). Pinckney returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).^[3]

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 has published several collections of essays covering topics such as African-American literature, politics, race, and other cultural issues. He 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 and society.

• 1986, Whiting Award^[4]
• 1992, High Cotton won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.^[5]
• 1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters^[6]
• 2022, His memoir Come Back in September was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography.^[7]
• 2022, James Tait Black Prize for Biography for Come Back in September^[8]

Pinckney is gay^[9] and lives with his partner, English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989.^[10] Pinckney currently lives in New York City, but previously lived with Fenton in Oxfordshire, England.^[11]

• 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)^[12]
• Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (2022)

• "England, Whose England?". Granta (16: Science). Summer 1985. (Subscription Required)
• Pinckney, Darryl (February 2010). "Lonely Hearts Club". Harper's. Vol. 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. 62 (3).
• Pinckney, Darryl (March 26, 2020). "Escaping Blackness". The New York Review of Books. 67 (5).
• Pinckney, Darryl (August 20, 2020). "'We Must Act Out Our Freedom'". The New York Review of Books. 67 (13).
• Pinckney, Darryl (November 5, 2020). "A Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". The New York Review of Books. 67 (17).

• (Collaborations with Robert Wilson)
  • The Forest (1988)
  • Orlando (1989)
  • Time Rocker (1995)
  • Garrincha - a street opera (2016)
  • Mary Said What She Said (2019)
  • Dorian (2022)
  • Pessoa: since I've been me (2024)

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

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