The University of Alabama Press Hogg

A fearless descent into the darkest corners of human desire and violence.First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R.Delany’s Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels.It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus.Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaney’s novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries.While testing readers’ tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation.Hogg’s characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity.Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.