Books by William Melvin Kelley
A Different Drummer
The stunning, thought-provoking first novel by a “lost giant of American literature” (The New Yorker)
One June afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young Black farmer named Tucker Caliban salted his fields, shot his horse, burned his house, and headed north with his wife and young child. His departure in the early summer of 1957 set off an exodus of the state’s entire Black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit. Through the exploration of gender roles, racial tension, religious exploitation and repressed sexuality, A Different Drummer forces readers to engage with a hypothetical situation rooted in the bleak reality of so many American citizens.
Dancers on the Shore
The first and only short story collection by William Melvin Kelley, and the source from which he drew inspiration for his following novels.
Originally published in 1964, this collection of sixteen stories includes three linked sets of stories about the Carey, Bedlow, and Dunford families. They represent the earliest work of William Melvin Kelley and provided a rich source of stories and characters who were to fill out his later novels.
Spanning generations from the Deep South during Reconstruction to New York City in the 1960s, these insightful stories depict African American families in their everyday normalcy. From Ivy League schools to the streets of Harlem, Dancers on the Shore showcases the power in families and the collective strength they drew from during one of the most politically charged generations in history.
A Drop of Patience
One of the great jazz novels of any era, A Drop of Patience tells the story of a blind horn player’s journey through the themes of race, blindness, and music.
At the age of five, Ludlow Washington is given up by his parents to a brutal white-run state institution for blind African American children, where everyone is taught music—the only trade by which they are expected to make a living. Ludlow is a prodigy on the horn and at fifteen is “purchased” out of the Home by a bandleader in the fictive Southern town of New Marsails.
By eighteen, he is married with a baby daughter, but as his reputation spreads, he seeks to grow musically, leaving his budding family for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in New York City. Navigating the worlds of music (and race and women), Ludlow’s career follows a familiar Icharas-type arc towards collapse. A nervous breakdown, recovery, and the long-delayed gift of public recognition fall before him, only for Ludlow to eventually retreat from the spotlight and return to his roots, finding solace in the Black church.
A Drop of Patience is a brilliant portrayal of a jazz musician and Black Americans relationship to the overarching American culture. It stands apart as an exemplary parable of African American history, of racial politics, and of musical creative genius.
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A searing, provocative satire by one of the most important African-American novelists of the twentieth century that illustrates America’s unique brand of racism that is interwoven with the legacy of slavery and the psyche of white America.
Mitchell Pierce is a well-off New York ad executive whose marriage is falling apart. He no longer feels any passion for his pregnant wife, Tam, and even feels estranged from his toddler son, Jake. Mitchell is trapped in an unrewarding and loveless life, and though domestic violence isn’t in his character, it is never very far away, either.
Mitchell’s life will inexplicably change one day however, when a young man appears at his apartment door to pick up the family’s Black maid Opal, for a date. Cooley, the young man, is no stranger to the household. The twins that Tam is carrying are a result of superfecundation—the fertilization of two separate ova by two separate males. So when one child is born Black and the other white, Mitchell goes on a quest to search for Cooley and make him take responsibility for his baby.
In the tradition of Brer Rabbit trickster tales, dem enacts a modern-day fable of turning the tables on the white oppressor, forcing them to acknowledge their casual brutality. By inverting the history of miscegenation and subjugation of African Americans, Kelley forces people of all racial backgrounds to take note of the cycle and how to recognize its hypocrisy in real life.
Dunfords Travels Everywheres
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • William Melvin Kelley’s final work, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he reintroduces some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.
“[A] lost giant of American Literature.” —The New Yorker
Beginning on an August Sunday in one of Europe’s strangest cities, Dunfords Travels Everywheres but always returns back to the same point—the “Begending”—where Mr. Charcarl’s dream becomes Chig Dunford’s reality (the “Ivy League Negro” in the world outside the Ivory Tower).
“Among the most innovative and exciting novelists in the history of international literature, the opportunity to honor William Melvin Kelley with the American Book Award is a great privilege. Before Columbus Foundation is elated to welcome his work back into print, thanks to Anchor Books. It is a unique thrill to see Dunfords Travels Everywheres now illustrated in it’s new edition by Aiki Kelley, whom we also honor with this year’s Award. The majesty of William Melvin Kelley’s vital contribution to international letters remains urgent and evermore medicinal in its cosmic scope and unifying embrace. The total arc and panorama of human experience, embodied in the mythologies we share from antiquity to the present are fully illuminated in William Melvin Kelley’s artistry. An absolute virtuoso of the language, with Dunfords Travels Everywheres, William Melvin Kelley ignites the spiritual imagination, reviving and resuscitating images of our journey with wit and grace. His masterwork is truly a wonder to behold. Vivid, charismatic, mercurial, musical, Dunfords Travels Everywheres stands as one of the great contributions to the art of the novel. Laughing to keep from crying, living life not dying, this new illustrated edition sings a joyous, uplifitng song.” —Justin Desmangles, citation from the American Book Award
Dis//Integration: 2 Novelas & 3 Stories & a Little Play
An odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life, by the “brilliant” (The New Yorker) author of A Different Drummer.
“There’s cleverness and craft in abundance here. Also, wisdom and even warmth.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
The linked “2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play” that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles “Chig” Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English professor at a small Vermont college, where he continues to struggle to finish his life-long study of the Reupeonese author Dupukshamin and find true love.
Along the way, as Chig’s sentimental education unfolds, we meet an array of memorable characters: John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; the mysterious Wendy Whitman, who breaks Chig’s heart; Merry, his troubled teen-age niece who Chig, in middle-age, agrees to look after; Raymond Winograd, the villainous department chair; Renka Bravo, the alluring dancer who might just make Chig an honest man; and one hundred Africans mysteriously chained together in the lower decks of Chig’s homeward-bound transatlantic liner.