Darryl Pinckney, author and poet

Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. He grew up in a middle class African-American family in the midwest and was educated at Columbia University. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, Slate, and The Nation. Pinckney is the author of High Cotton, a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1992. Additionally, he won the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Pinckney has also expressed his admiration for the long-running CBS soap opera, As the World Turns. His partner is English poet, James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989. Pinckney lives in New York City and Oxfordshire, England.From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature
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Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books; 1 edition (April 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465057608
ISBN-13: 978-0465057603
Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches

With this appreciation of three very different black writers, novelist Darryl Pinckney reminds us that marginal or neglected literary figures have a lot to tell us about the history of a people who are always "outsiders."

Born in Jamaica in 1883, J. A. Rogers was an early member of the Harlem Renaissance--a newspaper columnist, historian of Negro achievement, polemicist against white supremacy, and amateur sociologist of interracial sex as evidenced in his massive three-volume work Sex and Race. Vincent O. Carter, who came of age in 1920's Kansas City, wrote The Bern Book, an exploration of being black in a Swiss rather than an American setting. Caryl Phillips, a son of the generation of black Caribbeans who returned to Great Britain after the Second World War, has explored the psychology of migration in fiction and nonfiction that include The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood. Pinckney's essays on these writers, drawn from his Alain Locke Lectures at Harvard University, give us a rich understanding of what it has meant to be "children of the diaspora" over the past century.

High Cotton: A Novel
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Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 1, 1995)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140175032
ISBN-13: 978-0140175035
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.6 inches

Pinckney's remarkably accomplished first novel about growing up as a "nice Negro" in conservative Indianapolis is provocative, original and frequently hilarious.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An elegant, insightful novel that evokes the world of upper-middle-class blacks, following an unnamed narrator from a safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis, to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to the life of an expatriate in Paris. Through it all, his imagination is increasingly dominated by his elderly relations and the lessons of their experiences in the "Old Country" of the South.

William Blake and Slavery: Mind-forg'd Manacles
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David Bindman (Author), Darryl Pinckney (Author), William Blake (Author)

Paperback: 148 pages
Publisher: Hayward Gallery Publishing (July 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1853322598
ISBN-13: 978-1853322594
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches

TThe English poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) was uncommonly aware of the evils of slavery in his time, having illustrated Narrative of a Five Year's Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1791), John Stedman's firsthand account of the brutal suppression of a slave revolt in South America. But for Blake, the interest was not only in physical but mental enslavement. The ubiquity of "mind-forg'd manacles" (as he put it in his great poem "London") in a rapidly industrializing Europe compelled some of his most dramatic and complex text and images. With over 60 color reproductions from Blake's illuminated books, watercolors and engravings, all from the collection of The British Museum, William Blake and Slavery: Mind-forg'd Manacles presents a strong statement on this great artist's pungent and independent political vision. It includes an essay on the theme of slavery in Blake's visual imagery by the exhibition curator and leading Blake scholar David Bindman, as well as a text on Olaudah Equiano, an African ex-slave who campaigned for the abolition of slavery, by the novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney. This book commemorates both the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, and the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Blake's birth.

Pinckney on James Bladwin