The stunning, thought-provoking first novel by a "lost giant of American literature" (The New Yorker) June, 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets 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.

A Different Drummer

Literature & Fiction

Kelley, William Melvin

Humor & Satire

Anchor

Dis//Integration, a previously unpublished work by William Melvin Kelley, author of A Different Drummer, is a notable and welcome addition to African American literature. 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&nbsp;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:&nbsp;&nbsp;John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; Wendy Whitman, an actress passing for white, 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. DIS//INTEGRATION is an an odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life.

Dis//Integration: 2 Novelas & 3 Stories & a Little Play

Vintage

Traces the life of blind jazz musician Ludlow Washington as he develops his talent and learns who and who not to trust

A Drop of Patience: A Novel (Dark Tower Series)

United States

Ecco Pr

Dancers on the Shore

Howard Univ Pr

Dunford's Travels Everywheres

Travel

DOUBLEDAY

Dancers on the shore

Chatham Bookseller

A Drop of Patience

'A master at using humour to underscore the horror of racism, William Melvin Kelley is a writer whose work, decades later, continues to shed light on that which millions of people would rather remain hidden' 
MATEO ASKARIPOUR, AUTHOR OF BLACK BUCK\nA searing, provocative satire by one of the most important African-American novelists of the twentieth century that lays bare the abiding racism and the legacy of slavery on the psyche of white America.\nMitchell 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.\nMitchell's life will irrevocably change one day, though, when a young man appears at his apartment door to pick up the family's black maid, Opal, for a date. Cooley it turns out is not a stranger to the household. The twins that Tam is carrying are a result of superfecundation--the fertilization of two separate ova by two different males. So when one child is born black and the other white, Mitchell goes on a quest to find Cooley and make him take his baby.\nIn the tradition of Brer Rabbit trickster tales, dem enacts a modern-day fable of turning the tables on the white oppressor and inverting the history of miscegenation and subjugation of African Americans.

riverrun

William Melvin Kelley's final work, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.\nRide on out with Rab and Turt, two o'New Afriqueque's toughfast, ruefast Texnosass Arangers, as they battle Chief Pugmichillo and ricecure Mr. Charcarl Walker-Rider. Cut in on Carlyle Bedlowe, wrecker of marriage, saver of souls.\nOr just along with Chig Dunford, product of Harlem and private schools, on the circular voyage of self-discovery that takes him from Europe's Café of One Hand to Harlem's Jack O'Gee's Golden Grouse Bar & Restaurant.\nBeginning 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.

Dunfords Travels Everywheres

A Different Drummer, Curriculum Unit

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Center for Learning

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Books by Kelley, William Melvin