Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney's first novel was High Cotton (1992). The novel won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The story follows an unnamed narrator as he moves from his safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to eventually settling into the life as an expatriate in Paris. Through it all, his imagination is increasingly dominated by his elderly African American relations and the lessons of their experiences in the “Old Country” of the South.

Pinckney's next book was a collection of essays Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). Originating with Pinckney's Alain Locke Lectures at Harvard University, the essays focus on three writers: J. A. Rogers, Vincent O. Carter, and Caryl Phillips.

Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (reissued with a new essay in 2020) has been described as "Pinckney’s meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics "

Pinckney's second novel Black Deutschland (2016) was named one of The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year. His collection of essays titled Busted in New York and Other Essays includes a foreword by Zadie Smith.

Pinckney's most recent book is Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. In the book, Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York literary world. The book is a 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.