Samuel R. Delany is a renowned novelist and critic, whose award-winning fiction includes Atlantic: Three Tales (1995) and The Mad Man (1994), as well as Babel-17 (1966), Nova (1968) and Dhalgren (1975). Winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, he has been a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for the last decade.