Darryl Pinckney's writing has been recognised for its daring, its eloquence, and its ties to the African-American literary past. His first novel, High Cotton, an autobiographical examination of a young writer's journey from the Midwest to expatriate Paris, was published in 1992. Pinckney's most recent book, Sold and Gone, reviews the African-American literary tradition through the writings of Charles Chesnutt, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison. Pinckney has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. He also received the Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Pinckney was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton and has taught in the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard and in the School of Arts at Columbia, where he was educated.