''Dhalgren'' is a 1975
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
novel
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...
by American writer
Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. "Chip" Delany (, ) (born April 1, 1942), is an American author and literary critic. His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism, and essays (on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society). His ...
. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the
American Midwest
The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of the United States. I ...
cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe.
Plot overview
The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.
Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.
The novel's protagonist is "the Kid" (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who has partial amnesia: he can't remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot, as do characters in two other Delany novels and one short story: Mouse in ''
Nova
A nova (plural novae or novas) is a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently "new" star (hence the name "nova", which is Latin for "new") that slowly fades over weeks or months. Causes of the dramati ...
'' (1968), Hogg in ''
Hogg'' (1995), and
Roger
Roger is a given name, usually masculine, and a surname. The given name is derived from the Old French personal names ' and '. These names are of Germanic origin, derived from the elements ', ''χrōþi'' ("fame", "renown", "honour") and ', ' ( ...
in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" (1967). Possibly he has
schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdra ...
: the novel's narrative is intermittently incoherent (particularly at its end), the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of reality and the passages of time sometimes differ from those of other characters. Over the course of the story he also experiences significant memory loss. In addition, he is
dyslexic
Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, r ...
, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city. It is therefore unclear to what extent the events in the story are the product of an
unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in ''The Rhetoric of Fiction''. While unrel ...
.
Delany has stated that "Kid's sanity remains in question... for the same reason the disaster of the city is unexplained: such explanations would become a fixed signified straiting the play and interplay of the signifier - the city of signs - that flexes and reflexes above it."
[Samuel R. Delany (writing as K. Leslie Steiner), "Some Remarks toward a Reading of ''Dhalgren''" in '']The Straits of Messina
''The Straits of Messina'' is a 1989 non-fiction collection of essays, in which author and critic Samuel R. Delany discusses his own novels. The essays are published under his own name, and under the pen name K. Leslie Steiner.
The pieces by ...
'', Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989
Plot summary
In a forest somewhere outside the city, the protagonist meets a woman and they have sex. After, he tells her that he has "lost something"—he cannot remember his name. She leads him to a cave and tells him to enter. Inside, he finds long loops of chain fitted with miniature prisms, mirrors, and lenses. He dons the chain and leaves the cave, only to find the woman in the middle of a field, turning into a tree. Panicked, he flees. Many characters in the novel wear the same sort of "optic chain"; all are loath to discuss how they came to do so. On a nearby road, a passing truck stops to pick him up. The trucker, hauling artichokes, drops him off at the end of a suspension bridge leading across the river to Bellona.
As he crosses the bridge in the early morning darkness, the young man meets a group of women leaving the city. They ask him questions about the outside world and give him a weapon: a bladed "orchid," worn around the wrist with its blades sweeping up in front of the hand.
Once inside Bellona, an engineer, Tak Loufer, who was living a few miles outside of the city when the initial destruction happened, meets and befriends him. Tak has moved to Bellona and stayed there ever since. Upon learning that he cannot remember his name, Tak gives him a nickname—the Kid. Throughout the novel he is also referred to as "Kid", "Kidd", and often just "kid." Next Tak takes Kid on a short tour of the city. One stop is at a commune in the city park, where Kid sees two women reading a spiral notebook. When Kid looks at it, we see what he reads: The first page contains, word-for-word, the first sentences of ''Dhalgren''. As he reads further, however, the text diverges from the novel's opening.
In Chapter II, "The Ruins of Morning", Kid returns to the commune the next day and receives the notebook from Lanya Colson, one of the two women from the evening before. Shortly they become lovers. Their relationship lasts throughout the book. We meet or learn about several other characters, including George Harrison, a local cult hero and rumoured rapist; Ernest Newboy, a famous poet visiting Bellona by invitation of Roger Calkins, publisher and editor of the local newspaper, ''The Bellona Times''; Madame Brown, a psychotherapist; and, later in the novel, Captain Michael Kamp, an astronaut who, some years before, was in the crew of a successful moon landing.
The notebook Kid receives already has writing throughout, but only on the right hand pages. The left hand pages are blank. Glimpses of the text in the notebook, however, are extremely close to passages in ''Dhalgren'' itself, as if the notebook were an alternate draft of the novel. Other passages are verbatim from the final chapter of ''Dhalgren''. It is here in Chapter II that Kid begins using the blank pages of the notebook to compose poems. The novel describes the process of creating the poems—the emotions and the mechanics of the writing itself—at length and several times. We never see the actual poems, however, in their final form. Kid soon revises or removes any line that does appear in the text.
The third and longest chapter, "House of the Ax", involves Kid's interactions with the Richards family: Mr. Arthur Richards, his wife Mary Richards, their daughter June (who may or may not have been raped publicly by George Harrison, whom she is now fixated on), and son Bobby. Through Madame Brown they hire Kid to help them move from one apartment to another in the mostly-abandoned Labry Apartments. Led by Mary Richards, they are "keeping up appearances." Mr. Richards leaves every day to go to work—though no office or facility in the city seems to be in operation—while Mrs. Richards acts as though there's nothing truly disastrous happening in Bellona. By some force of will, she causes almost everyone who comes into contact with her to play along. While carrying a carpet to the elevator, June backs Bobby into an open elevator shaft, where he falls to his death. There is reason to believe that June did this intentionally after Bobby threatened to reveal her relationship with George Harrison to the family.
The third chapter is also where successful poet Ernest Newboy befriends Kid. Newboy takes an interest in Kid's poems and mentions them to Roger Calkins. By the end of the chapter, Calkins is preparing to print a book of Kid's poems.
As the novel progresses, Kid falls in with the Scorpions, a loose-knit gang, three of whom have severely beaten him earlier in the book. Almost accidentally, Kid becomes their leader. (Much of this suggests the American "mythical folk hero," Billy the Kid, whom Delany used in his earlier, Nebula Award-winning novel, ''
The Einstein Intersection
__NOTOC__
''The Einstein Intersection'' is a 1967 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The title is a reference to Einstein's Theory of Relativity connecting to Kurt Gödel's Constructible universe, which is an analogy to science meeting p ...
''
967) Denny, a 15-year-old scorpion, becomes Kid's and Lanya's lover, so that the relationship with Lanya turns into a lasting three-way sexual linkage. Kid also begins writing things other than poems in the notebook, keeping a journal of events and his thoughts.
In Chapter VI, "Palimpsest", Calkins throws a party for Kid and his book, ''Brass Orchids'', at his sprawling estate. At Calkins's suggestion, Kid brings along twenty or thirty friends: the scorpion "nest." While Calkins himself is absent from the gathering, there are extended descriptions of the interactions between what is left of Bellona's high society and, in effect, a street gang. At the party, Kid is interviewed by William (later passages of the book suggest William's last name is "Dhalgren," but this is never confirmed).
In the concluding Chapter VII, "The Anathemata: a plague journal", bits of the whole now and again appear to be laid out. Shifting from the omniscient viewpoint of the first six chapters, this chapter comprises numerous journal entries from the notebook, all of which appear to be by Kid. Several passages from this chapter have, however, already appeared verbatim earlier in the novel when Kid reads what was already in the notebook—written when he received it. In this chapter rubrics run along beside many sections of the main text, mimicking the writing as it appears in the notebook. (In the middle of this chapter, a rubric running contains the following sentence: ''I have come to to wound the autumnal city.'') Recalling Kid's entry into the city, the final section contains a near paragraph-for-paragraph echo of his initial confrontation with the women on the bridge. This time, however, the group leaving is almost all male, and the person entering is a young woman who says almost exactly what Kid did himself at the beginning of his stay in Bellona.
The story ends:
As with ''
Finnegans Wake
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. It has been called "a work of fiction whi ...
'', the unclosed closing sentence can be read as leading into the unopened opening sentence, turning the novel into an enigmatic circle.
[
][Paul Di Filippo, "Dhalgren", on-line review from Sci Fi Weekly (11 June 2001]
Major themes
Mythology
Writing in the ''
Libertarian Review
''Libertarian Review'' was an American libertarian magazine published until 1981. It had been established by Robert Kephart in 1972 as a book-review magazine, initially titled ''SIL Book Review'' (2 issues), then ''Books for Libertarians'', and ...
'', Jeff Riggenbach compared ''Dhalgren'' to the work of
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
. A quotation from his review was included on the inside advertisement page of the fifteenth printing of the Bantam edition. As the critic and novelist
William Gass
William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven vol ...
writes of Joyce, "The
Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...
ic parallels in ''
Ulysses
Ulysses is one form of the Roman name for Odysseus, a hero in ancient Greek literature.
Ulysses may also refer to:
People
* Ulysses (given name), including a list of people with this name
Places in the United States
* Ulysses, Kansas
* Ulysse ...
'' are of marginal importance to the reading of the work but are of fundamental importance to the writing of it. . . . Writers have certain ordering compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are part of the book only in the sense that they make the writing possible. This is a widespread phenomenon."
[''Conversations with William Gass'', edited by Theadore G. Ammon, pp. 32-33, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, 1996.] Almost certainly this is also the case with ''Dhalgren'': Writing about the novel both as himself and under his pseudonym K. Leslie Steiner, Delany has made similar statements and suggested that it is easy to make too much of the mythological resonances. As he says, they are merely resonances, and not keys to any particular secrets the novel holds.
Circular text, multistable perception, echoes, and repeated imagery
Delany has pointed out that ''Dhalgren'' is a circular text with multiple entry points. Those points include the schizoid babble that appears in various sections of the story.
[Samuel R. Delany, "Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things" in '']The Straits of Messina
''The Straits of Messina'' is a 1989 non-fiction collection of essays, in which author and critic Samuel R. Delany discusses his own novels. The essays are published under his own name, and under the pen name K. Leslie Steiner.
The pieces by ...
'', Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989 Hints along those lines are given in the novel. Besides the Chapter VII rubric mentioned above (containing the sentence "I have come to to wound the autumnal city"—the exact sentence that would be created by joining the novel's unclosed closing sentence to the unopened opening) the most obvious is the point where Kid hears ". . . grendal grendal grendal grendal . . ." going through his mind and suddenly realizes he was listening from the wrong spot: he was actually hearing ". . . Dhalgren Dhalgren Dhalgren . . ." over and over again.
[Jean Mark Gawron, "On ''Dhalgren''" in ''Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany'', edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996 ] The ability of texts to become circular is something that Delany explores in other works, such as ''
Empire Star
''Empire Star'' is a 1966 science fiction novella by Samuel R. Delany. It is often published together with another book, most frequently (three times) with '' The Ballad of Beta-2''. Delany hoped to have it first published as part of an Ace Doub ...
''.
Delany conceived and executed ''Dhalgren'' as a literary
Multistable perception
Multistable perception (or bistable perception) is a perceptual phenomenon in which an observer experiences an unpredictable sequence of spontaneous subjective changes. While usually associated with visual perception (a form of optical illusion), ...
—the observer (reader) may choose to shift his perception back and forth. Central to this construction is the notebook itself: Kidd receives the notebook shortly after entering Bellona. In the first several chapters of the novel we see, on several occasions, exactly what Kid reads when he looks at the open notebook. The notebook appears to take over as the main text of the novel starting at Chapter VII, coming almost seamlessly after Chapter VI. However, though Chapter VII reads as though it is written by Kid, many of the passages shown in earlier chapters appear verbatim in Chapter VII. Yet for Kid to have read those passages earlier, the passages must have been written ''before'' he received the notebook. In fact, the last few pages of the novel show Kid leaving Bellona. The last sentence of that departure sequence is the incomplete one that conceivably loops back to the beginning of the book. However, earlier in the novel the notebook falls to the ground and Kid reads the last page. The reader sees exactly what Kid reads: the last four sentences of the novel, word for word. This happens well before a point in the novel where Kid specifically states that he only wrote the poems, and "all that other stuff" was already in there when he received the notebook. However, those four sentences are part of a longer section at the end of the novel which, when read, was obviously written by Kid. This means he left Bellona—taking the notebook with him, for how else would he be able to write about his departure—prior to that notebook being found inside Bellona and given to him. Delany has specifically stated that it is not a matter of settling or deciding which text is authoritative. It is more a matter of allowing the reader to experience perceptual shifts in the same way that a Necker cube can be viewed.
Akin to the hints regarding its circular nature, ''Dhalgren'' also contains at least one hint towards the perceptual shifts: Denny's book of
M. C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher (; 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for most of his life neglected in t ...
prints.
[Mary Kay Bray, "Rites of Reversal: Double Consciousness in Delany's ''Dhalgren''" first appearing in ''Black American Literature Forum'' (Vol. 18, Number 2, Summer 1984)] Additionally, Jeffrey Allen Tucker has written that Delany's unpublished notes regarding the writing of ''Dhalgren'' contain direct references to the novel itself working as a
Möbius Strip
In mathematics, a Möbius strip, Möbius band, or Möbius loop is a surface that can be formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. As a mathematical object, it was discovered by Johann Benedict Listing and Augu ...
, and makes a direct connection to Escher's "Möbius Strip".
[Jeffrey Allen Tucker, ''A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference'', Wesleyan University Press: 2004 ]
Within the looping text that comprises ''Dhalgren'', many other textual plays on perception can be found. Imagery and conversations, some hundreds of pages apart, closely echo each other. One case in point: The scenes on the bridge mentioned in the "Plot Summary" above. In another, light sliding across the face of a trucker driving at night is echoed in the description of light sliding across the face of a building. The repeated motif of a scratch down the lower leg of several female characters at different points in the novel is yet another example.
[Samuel R. Delany, "Of Doubts and Dreams" in ''Distant Stars'', Bantam Books, New York: 1981 ]
Delany's personal experience of reality
Samuel R. Delany has
dyslexia
Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, r ...
and
dysmetria
Dysmetria ( en, wrong length) is a lack of coordination of movement typified by the undershoot or overshoot of intended position with the hand, arm, leg, or eye. It is a type of ataxia. It can also include an inability to judge distance or scale.
...
. He once spent time in the mental health ward of a hospital. And he has repeatedly spoken and written of seeing burned-out sections of great American cities that most people didn't see, or even know existed. ''Dhalgren'' is a literary exposition of all these experiences for the "normal" reader.
Influences
''Dhalgren'' is often compared to James Joyce's ''
Ulysses (novel)
''Ulysses'' is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal ''The Little Review'' from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 Feb ...
''. Delany himself has cited poets
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
,
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
, and
Paul Valéry
Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, mus ...
as influences on the book, as well as
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.
Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...
's poem "The Instruction Manual".
Elsewhere he cites
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how ...
,
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA (29 November 1919 – 17 August 2010) was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work '' The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction'' and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.
He was ...
, and
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, ''My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer'' won the American Book Award for poetry. ...
.
Kenneth R. James has elaborated subtextual ties to mathematician
G. Spencer-Brown
George Spencer-Brown (2 April 1923 – 25 August 2016) was an English polymath best known as the author of '' Laws of Form''. He described himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, co ...
's ''
Laws of Form
''Laws of Form'' (hereinafter ''LoF'') is a book by G. Spencer-Brown, published in 1969, that straddles the boundary between mathematics and philosophy. ''LoF'' describes three distinct logical systems:
* The "primary arithmetic" (described in C ...
''.
Literary significance and criticism
With over a million sales, ''Dhalgren'' is by far Delany's most popular book—and also his most controversial. Critical reaction to ''Dhalgren'' has ranged from high praise (both inside and outside the
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
community) to extreme dislike (mostly within the community).
A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference
' by Jeffrey Allen Tucker, Wesleyan University Press, 2004, page 57. The relevant quote states that of the nearly 100 reviews of Dhalgren in SF magazines and fanzines at the time, "most of them were hostile or negative." However, ''Dhalgren'' was a commercial success, selling a half million copies in the first two years, and over a million copies worldwide since then, with "its appeal reaching beyond the usual SF readership."
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as ''cyberpunk''. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his ...
has referred to ''Dhalgren'' as "a riddle that was never meant to be solved."
Darrell Schweitzer
Darrell Charles Schweitzer (born August 27, 1952) is an American writer, editor, and critic in the field of speculative fiction. Much of his focus has been on dark fantasy and horror fiction, horror, although he does also work in science fictio ...
stated, "''Dhalgren'' is, I think, the most disappointing thing to happen to science fiction since
Robert Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein (; July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accu ...
made a complete fool of himself with ''
I Will Fear No Evil
''I Will Fear No Evil'' is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialised in '' Galaxy'' (July, August/September, October/November, December 1970) and published in hardcover in 1970. The title is taken from ...
''."
In 2015,
Elizabeth Hand characterized the novel as "a dense, transgressive, hallucinatory, Joycean tour-de-force".
Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon (; born Edward Hamilton Waldo, February 26, 1918 – May 8, 1985) was an American fiction author of primarily fantasy, science fiction and horror, as well as a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 sh ...
called it "the very best ever to come out of the science fiction field". By contrast,
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison (May 27, 1934 – June 28, 2018) was an American writer, known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction and for his outspoken, combative personality. Robert Bloch, the author of '' Psycho'' ...
hated the novel. When the book appeared, Ellison wrote: "I must be honest. I gave up after 361 pages. I could not permit myself to be gulled or bored any further."
['']Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
''. Sunday, February 23, 1975, p. 64
Delany has speculated that "a good number of ''Dhalgren'' more incensed readers, the ones bewildered or angered by the book, simply cannot read the proper distinction between sex and society and the nature and direction of the causal arrows between them, a vision of which lies just below the novel's surface."
''Bellona, Destroyer of Cities'', a stage adaptation of (or sequel to) ''Dhalgren'', was produced at
The Kitchen
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was founde ...
in New York City in April 2010.
Publishing history
''Dhalgren'' was officially published in January, 1975 (with copies available on bookshelves as early as the first week in December, 1974), as a paperback original (a
Frederik Pohl
Frederik George Pohl Jr. (; November 26, 1919 – September 2, 2013) was an American science-fiction writer, editor, and fan, with a career spanning nearly 75 years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem "Elegy to a Dead Satelli ...
selection) by Bantam Books. The Bantam edition went through 19 printings, selling slightly more than a million copies.
A hardcover edition was published by
Gregg Press
Gregg Press was founded about 1965 by Charles Gregg in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey to distribute in the United States the antiquarian reprints published in the UK by Gregg Press International.
Gregg decided he wanted to publish scholarly repri ...
(1977), based on the Bantam paperback edition with many errors corrected, and with an introduction by Jean Mark Gawron. After the Bantam edition went out of print the book was republished by
Grafton (1992); Wesleyan University Press /
University Press of New England
The University Press of New England (UPNE), located in Lebanon, New Hampshire and founded in 1970, was a university press consortium including Brandeis University, Dartmouth College (its host member), Tufts University, the University of New Hampsh ...
(1996); and Vintage Books, an imprint of
Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...
(2001), the latter two with an introduction by
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as ''cyberpunk''. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his ...
. In 2010 Gollancz brought out an edition as part of its SF Masterworks series, and in 2014 an ebook edition of the novel appeared.
* 1975, USA, Bantam Books (), Pub date January 1975, paperback (First edition)
* 1977, USA, Gregg Press (), Pub date June 1977, hardcover
* 1982, USA, Bantam Books (), Pub date December 1982, paperback
* 1992, UK, Grafton Press (), Pub date 1992, paperback
* 1996, USA, Wesleyan University Press (University Press of New England) (), Pub date 1996, paperback and limited edition slip-case hardcover edition of 300 signed and numbered copies.
* 2001, USA, Vintage Books (ISBN ), Pub date 15 May 2001, paperback
* 2002, USA, Vintage Books (), Pub date 1 February 2002, paperback
* 2010, UK, Gollancz / Orion (978-0-575-09099-6), Masterworks of SF II Series, trade paperback
* 2014, USA, Open Road Media (978-1-4804-6178-9), ebook
References
Sources
* Samuel R. Delany, "About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words" in ''The Jewel-Hinged Jaw'', Berkeley Books, New York: 1977
* Robert Elliot Fox, "'This You-Shaped Hole of Insight and Fire': Meditations on Delany's ''Dhalgren''" in ''Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany'', edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996
* Jean Mark Gawron, "'On ''Dhalgren" in ''Ash of Stars; On the Writings of Samuel R. Delany'', edited by James Sallis, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson: 1996
* Bill Wood (editor), ''On Dhalgren'', Fantastic Books, New York: 2021
External links
SF Site review of novelBookreporter Review
{{Samuel R. Delany
1974 American novels
1974 science fiction novels
1970s LGBT novels
American post-apocalyptic novels
Novels by Samuel Delany
Metafictional novels
Novels with gay themes
LGBT speculative fiction novels
American LGBT novels
Fictional portrayals of schizophrenia