William Melvin Kelley

• Born: November 1, 1937
• Place of Birth: New York City, New York
• Died: February 1, 2017
• Place of Death: New York City, New York

Kelley was an original, award-winning writer who showcased his skills during the creative period of the Black Arts movement. His well-crafted novels, short stories, and essays are sophisticated and brilliant testimony to the movement’s early accomplishments.

Early Life

Born November 1, 1937, William Melvin Kelley Jr. wrote of growing up in the Bronx area of New York City in a family that was warm and rich in family lore. His father, William Melvin Kelley Sr., a newspaper reporter during the 1920s and 1930s, had been editor of the legendary African American newspaper The New York Amsterdam News. At the age of six, William Melvin Kelley Jr. entered the prestigious Fieldston program of private schools, progressing through its levels until his graduation in 1957. His early education was similar to the rest of his upbringing: non-racialized and occurring in integrated environments. His playmates were diverse ethnically, and his schooling was largely unpressured. In an autobiographical essay, Kelley wrote that Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953) was a comic-book version of Fyodor Dostoevski’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886); he received a good grade for the essay.

Kelley was an excellent student and was accepted at Harvard to study law, but later he decided to become a writer. In addition to his father, another major influence on Kelley was his maternal grandmother, Jessie Marin Garcia. Nana Jessie’s career as a skilled dressmaker demonstrated to Kelley important values that he sought to sustain in his own art. Through her, he received an appreciation of the lore and ethos of the South and its stories. She could trace their family heritage to a Confederate officer and decades of racial mixing.

Life’s Work

At Harvard, Kelley came under the tutelage of modernist writer Archibald MacLeish and postmodernist novelist John Hawkes. In 1960, Kelley won the Dana Reed Prize for his creative writing in a literary magazine, allowing him to concentrate on his first novel, A Different Drummer. He soon dropped out of Harvard, and the novel was published in 1962 to a widely appreciative audience. Among the many accolades he received were a fellowship from the John Hay Whitney Foundation and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In October 1962, Kelley was anointed a member of the New Wave of African American talent by The Negro Digest, the literary periodical that would soon root the Black Arts movement.

Kelley’s craft was shown in the ease with which his characters carried themes of the race experience through narrative structure and language. It might appear crazy for a southern African American man to separate himself from his world by destroying his land (with salt), his animals, and his crops and then immigrating to the North. However, in the narrative hands of Kelley, this becomes a natural course for protagonist Tucker Caliban to take in A Different Drummer. In fact, Caliban’s move is so readily understood that an entire state’s population of African Americans follows him in his exodus. The novel took its title and themes of separation from Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden (1854). Kelley’s postmodern displacement of a people upends and satirizes the dynamic of enslavement upon which so much of the race experience had depended. The White men who sit on the porch observing the exodus soon realize this, that they will be left with nothing. The lynching of the northern African American man at the end of the tale, whom they make dance and entertain them for one last time, becomes an ironic expression of Southern pain. The exodus reflects Caliban’s intergenerational separation from a stained racial past, in which the enslaver Dewitt Willson had killed Caliban’s African ancestor who did not want his infant son, named First Caliban, enslaved and anchored to the land.

The plot of A Different Drummer draws easy historical parallels with previous exoduses, including the Great Migration to the North of many Southern African Americans in the early twentieth century. It poses, in addition, significant and engaging questions and provides a revealing philosophical discourse on the Black Power movement’s call for a separate state for a disaffected African American population.

A Different Drummer received wide critical notice, marking Kelley as a new and exciting voice with polished craft and technique. Kelley’s collection of short stories, Dancers on the Shore, followed in 1964, and he garnered more fellowships from the New York Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 1965, he accepted a position as writer-in-residence at State University College of New York.

Kelley published three more novels. A Drop of Patience (1965) tells the story of a blind musician whose lack of sight emphasizes a tapestry of social forces that are not seen, but rather heard and felt. The satirical novel dem (1967) presents the ordeals of a White advertising executive, who negotiates the realities of work, suburban life, and the encroachment of television and soap operas while searching for the father of the African American twin birthed by his wife. Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970) is Kelley’s tribute to James Joyce, in which he merges different linguistic forms.

Kelley’s essays and short fiction appeared in numerous magazines and journals, among them The Saturday Evening Post, African American World, The New Yorker, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review. His best known stories included "The Only Man on Liberty Street" and "A Visit to Grandmother." He taught at the New School for Social Research and abroad in Paris and Jamaica. He began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1989.

Despite the critical acclaim Kelley received early in his career, in the 1970s he fell into obscurity. The difficult, experimental nature of his later works and the general changing political and social climate contributed to the lack of attention. Though he reportedly continued to write constantly, he published no further books during his lifetime.

Kelley married Karen Gibson, who later changed her name to Aiki Kelley, in 1962. The couple had two daughters. Kelley died on February 1, 2017, in New York City due to complications from kidney failure. He was seventy-nine years old. Following his death, there was a new rush of interest in Kelley and his works. A Different Drummer was reissued after a bidding war for the rights, and received a fresh wave of critical praise. Many in the literary world also came to credit Kelley with the first printed use of the slang term "woke," meaning attuned to issues of race and social justice, in a 1962 op-ed piece.

Significance

Despite his general lack of recognition through most of his career, Kelley received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008, a tribute to his literary accomplishments that have helped produce an understanding of race and diversity. With a voice honed in pride of family, he was able to merge satire, myth, fantasy, and dream with postmodern experiments in linearity, voice, and language. An accomplished and respected craftsman, Kelley produced literary works that remain classics of the Black Arts movement.

Bibliography

Grimes, William. "William Melvin Kelley, Who Explored Race in Experimental Novels, Is Dead at 79." The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/books/william-melvin-kelley-who-explored-race-in-experimental-novels-is-dead-at-79.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.

Kelley, William Melvin. "Shades: What I Learned About Slavery and Racism at 4060 Carpenter Avenue, The Bronx." Transforming Anthropology 13, no. 1 (April, 2005): 47-54.

Schulz, Kathryn. "The Lost Giant of American Literature." The New Yorker, 29 Jan. 2018, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost-giant-of-american-literature. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.

Sundquist, Eric J. "Promised Lands: A Different Drummer." Triquarterly 107/108 (Winter, 2000): 268-284.

Wardi, Anissa J. "William Melvin Kelley." In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.