Darryl Pinckney

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]

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 book 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, Germany, in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.^[4]

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.^{[citation needed]}

Pinckney's memoir Come Back in September was published in 2022. Rachel Cooke in an interview for The Observer described reading it as "like being at a particularly fabulous literary party. ...But the real star of the show – the book's constant and slightly terrifying presence – is the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, Pinckney’s friend of more than three decades and the key that first turned the lock on his exciting New York life."^[5]

• 1986, Whiting Award^[6]
• 1992, High Cotton won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.^[7]
• 1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters^[8]
• 2022, Come Back in September was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography.^[9][10]
• 2022, James Tait Black Prize for Biography for Come Back in September^[11]

Pinckney is gay^[12] and lives with his partner, English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989.^[13] Pinckney currently lives in New York City, but previously lived with Fenton in Oxfordshire, England.^[14]

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)^[12]
• 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. Vol. February 2010. 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. 62 (3). February 19, 2015.
• "Escaping Blackness". The New York Review of Books. 67 (5). March 26, 2020.
• "'We Must Act Out Our Freedom'". The New York Review of Books. 67 (13). August 20, 2020.
• "A Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". The New York Review of Books. 67 (17). November 5, 2020.

Theatre texts

• (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)