His next work was the trilogy
The Fall of the Towers, followed by
The Ballad of Beta-2 and
Babel-17; he described his writing in this period, and his marriage to Hacker, in his memoir
The Motion of Light in Water. In 1966, while Hacker remained in New York, Delany took a five-month trip to France, England, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. During this period, he wrote
The Einstein Intersection. He drew on these locales in several works, including
Nova and the short stories "
Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net". These works received critical praise:
Algis Budrys called Delany a genius and poet and listed him with
J. G. Ballard,
Brian W. Aldiss, and
Roger Zelazny as "an earthshaking new kind" of writer, while Judith Merril labeled him "TNT (The New Thing)".
Babel-17 and
The Einstein Intersection won the
Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966 and 1967, respectively. "The Star-Pit", Delany's first professional short story, was published by
Frederick Pohl in the February 1967 issue of
Worlds of Tomorrow, and he placed three more in other magazines that year. and
Nova. This was published by
Doubleday, marking Delany's departure from Ace; it was his last science fiction novel until
Dhalgren in 1975. Weeks after Delany's return, he and Hacker began to live separately. Delany played and lived communally for five months on the
Lower East Side with the Heavenly Breakfast, a
folk-rock band whose other members were Susan Schweers, Steven Greenbaum (aka Wiseman), and Bert Lee (later a founding member of the
Central Park Sheiks). Delany wrote a memoir of his experiences with the band and communal life, which was eventually published as
Heavenly Breakfast (1979). After he and Hacker briefly came together again, she moved to San Francisco. On New Year's Eve in 1968, Delany joined her; they then moved to London. In the summer of 1971 Delany returned to New York, where he lived at the Albert Hotel in
Greenwich Village. In 1972, Delany directed a short film entitled
The Orchid (originally titled
The Science Fiction Film in the Latter Twentieth Century), produced by Barbara Wise. Shot in
16 mm with color and sound, the production also employed David Wise,
Adolfas Mekas, and was scored by John Herbert McDowell. That November, Delany was a visiting writer at
Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. That year, Delany wrote two issues of the comic book
Wonder Woman, during a controversial period when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues No. 202 and No. 203 of the series. He was initially supposed to write a six-issue story arc that would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic, but the story arc was canceled after
Gloria Steinem led a lobbying effort protesting the removal of Wonder Woman's powers, a change predating Delany's involvement. Scholar Ann Matsuuchi concluded that Steinem's feedback was "conveniently used as an excuse" by DC management. From December 1972 to December 1974, Delany and Hacker lived in
Marylebone, London. During this period, Delany began working with sexual themes in earnest and wrote two pornographic works,
Equinox (originally published as
The Tides of Lust), and
Hogg, which was unpublishable at the time due to its transgressive content; it did not find print until 1995. Delany's eleventh novel,
Dhalgren, was published in 1975 to both literary acclaim (from both inside and outside the science fiction community) and derision (mostly from within the community). It sold more than one million copies. After a lengthy exchange of letters with
Leslie Fiedler, Delany returned to the United States at Fiedler's behest to teach at the
University at Buffalo as Visiting Butler Professor of English for the spring 1975 semester. That summer he returned to New York City. Though he published two more major science fiction novels (
Triton and
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) in the decade following
Dhalgren, Delany began to work in fantasy and science fiction criticism. Beginning with
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), a collection of critical essays that applied then-nascent
literary theory to science fiction studies, he published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. He was also a visiting fellow at the
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1977 and the
University at Albany in 1978. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was
Return to Nevèrÿon, a four-volume series of
sword and sorcery tales. In 1987, Delany was a visiting fellow at
Cornell University. The next year, he became a professor of comparative literature at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. He held this post for 11 years, before spending a year and a half as an English professor at the
University at Buffalo. Delany's works in the 1990s included
They Fly at Çiron, a re-written and expanded version of an unpublished short story he had written in 1962, and his last novel in either the science fiction or fantasy genres for many years. He also published his novel
The Mad Man and several essay collections, including
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), a pair of essays in which Delany drew on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop
Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men in New York City. Delany received the
Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from
Publishing Triangle in 1993; he has described this as the award of which he is proudest. After an invited stay at the artist's community
Yaddo, he moved to the English Department of
Temple University in January 2001, where he taught until his retirement in April 2015. In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film,
The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, directed by
Fred Barney Taylor. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007
Tribeca Film Festival, and in 2008, it tied for Jury Award for Best Documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Also in 2007, Delany was the April "calendar boy" in the "Legends of the Village" calendar put out by Village Care of New York. In 2008, his novel
Dark Reflections was a winner of the
Stonewall Book Award. In 2010, Delany was one of five judges (along with
Andrei Codrescu,
Sabina Murray,
Joanna Scott and
Carolyn See) for the
National Book Awards fiction category. in June 2011 His science fiction novel
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was published by Magnus Books on his birthday in 2012. In 2013 he received the
Brudner Prize from Yale University, for his contributions to gay literature. The same year, his comic book writer friend and planned literary executor,
Robert Morales, died. He served as
Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the
University of Chicago during the winter quarter of 2014. In 2015, the year Delany retired from teaching at Temple University, the
Caribbean Philosophical Association awarded him its Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award. Since 2018, his archive has been housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale, where it is currently being organized. Before that time, his papers were housed at the
Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. ==Personal life==