High Cotton

Darryl Pinckney (born 1953) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist who grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was educated at Columbia University. He is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel High Cotton (1992), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and his memoir Come Back in September (2022), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Pinckney has also received the Whiting Award (1986) and the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose (1994) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and contributes frequently to publications like the New York Review of Books.