Name William Kelley Role Novelist | ||
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Books A Different Drummer, Dancers on the shore, A Drop of Patience, Dem: A Black Man's Sla, Dunfords travels everywheres | ||
Vlog: A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley
William Melvin Kelley (November 1, 1937 – February 1, 2017) was a prominent 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.
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Life and work
William Melvin Kelley was born in New York City on November 1, 1937. He was educated at the Fieldston School in New York. Later, he attended Harvard University (class of 1960), where he studied under John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish. While a student at Harvard, he was awarded the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing.
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. Another film to which Kelley contributed is The Beauty That I Saw, assembled from Kelley's own video diaries of Harlem. Edited by Benjamin Oren Abrams, this film was featured at the Harlem International Film Festival in 2015.
Over the course of his career, Kelley published four novels and a volume of short stories. In an interview from 2012, Kelley claims to have completed two more novels that have, thus far, remained unpublished. According to Robert E. Fleming:
"From the beginning of his career in 1962, William Melvin Kelley has employed his distinctive form of Black comedy to examine the absurdities surrounding American racial attitudes."
Death
Kelley died in Manhattan on February 1, 2017 due to complications from kidney failure. He was 79.