These days, it seems to have settled into the groove of a cult classic. Dick once called it “the worst trash I’ve ever read”), turned into a rock opera, dropped by its publisher, and reissued by others. It has been cited as the downfall of science fiction (Philip K. In the 35 years since its publication, Dhalgren has been adored and reviled with roughly equal vigor. It was a very long, slow process.” It took him five years-not long by epic-novel standards, but a lifetime for an author who once wrote a book in eleven days to fund a trip to Europe. When I got to the bottom I’d copy the sentence out to see if I wanted it. “Then I would work my way down the page, revising the sentence, again and again. “I wrote out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sentences at the top of notebook pages,” he remembers. And yet, he tells me, the actual writing process was deliberate and precise. It is, he says, exactly the effect he was going for. When I mention this to Delany, he is pleased. It seems to have been written by an insane person in a tantric blurt of automatic writing. It’s like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome. The book forms a Finnegans Wake–style loop-its opening and closing sentences feed into one another-so the whole thing just keeps going and going forever. To top it off, this craziness trickles down to us through the consciousness of a character who is, himself, very likely crazy: a disoriented outsider who arrives in Bellona with no memory of his name, wearing only one sandal, and who proceeds to spend most of his time either having graphic sex with fellow refugees or writing inscrutable poems in a notebook-a notebook that also happens to contain actual passages of Dhalgren itself. The smoke clears, occasionally, to reveal celestial impossibilities: two moons, a giant swollen sun. Buildings burn, then repair themselves, then burn again.

The paper arrives every morning bearing arbitrary dates: 1837, 1984, 2022.

Gangsters roam the streets hidden inside menacing holograms of dragons and griffins and giant praying mantises. Riots and fires have cut the population down to a thousand. Phones and TVs are out electricity is spotty money is obsolete. The book is set in Bellona, a middle-American city struggling in the aftermath of an unspecified cataclysm. It doesn’t just document our craziness, it documents our craziness crazily: 800 epic pages of gorgeous, profound, clumsy, rambling, violent, randy, visionary, goofy, postapocalyptic sci-fi prose poetry. Delany’s Dhalgren is-like Moby-Dick, Naked Lunch, or “Chocolate Rain” -an essential monument both to, and of, American craziness.