Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met on their first day together in high school in September 1956, and were married five years later in August 1961, due to her pregnancy (which later miscarried). Decades later Frederik Pohl called him "a person who is never addressed by his friends as Sam, Samuel or any other variant of the name his parents gave him."ĭelany attended the Dalton School and, for two months out of each summer for five years, from 1951 through 1956, he attended Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, New York, followed by the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany envied children with nicknames and took one for himself on the first day of summer camp, at about age twelve, by answering "They mostly call me Chip" when asked his name. The family lived in the top two floors of a three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings.
His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was the first black Bishop of the Episcopal Church.
The civil rights pioneers Sadie and Bessie Delany were his aunts he used some of their adventures as the basis for Elsie and Corry in "Atlantis: Model 1924", the opening novella in his semi-autobiographical collection Atlantis: Three Tales. (1906–1960), ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until his death in 1960. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany (1916–1995), was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. Samuel Delany was born on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem.