William Melvin Kelley


William Melvin Kelley was an African-American novelist and short-story writer. He is perhaps best known for his debut novel, A Different Drummer, published in 1962. He was also a university professor and creative writing instructor. In 2008, he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Life and work

William Melvin Kelley was born in New York City on November 1, 1937, and grew up in The Bronx. He was educated at the Fieldston School in New York and at Harvard University, where he studied under John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish. While a student at Harvard, he was awarded the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. His debut novel, A Different Drummer, was published when he was 24 years old, in 1962. In that year he married Karen Gibson. In 1964 Kelley's short-story collection, Dancers on the Shore, was published, and in 1964 his second novel, A Drop of Patience.
In the 1960s Kelley lived in Paris, France, where he wrote his novel dəm and lectured in American literature at the University of Paris He also spent some time in Rome, and after the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Kelley and his wife decided they did not want to raise their family in the US, and with their two young daughters moved to Jamaica, where he and his family converted to Judaism.
Kelley was also a teacher and writing instructor. His academic appointments included a time as writer-in-residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo; he also taught at the New School for Social Research and at Sarah Lawrence College from 1989 until his death in 2017.
In 1988 Kelley starred in Excavating Harlem in 2290, which he also wrote and produced, collaborating with Steve Bull to bring it to the screen. He also contributed to The Beauty That I Saw, a film assembled from Kelley's video diaries of Harlem. Edited by Benjamin Oren Abrams, it was featured at the Harlem International Film Festival in 2015.
Kelley published four novels and a volume of short stories. In a 2012 interview he claimed to have completed two more novels that have thus far remained unpublished. According to Robert E. Fleming:

Death

Kelley died in Manhattan on February 1, 2017, due to complications from kidney failure. He was 79.