Lost literary masterpiece of 1960s black America comes to UK

William Melvin Kelley found acclaim, then faded from view. Now, as his debut is reissued in the UK, his family recalls that he always knew he was ‘sitting on a goldmine’

He was a rising star of the American literary scene whose debut novel, a dark satire on race and America, was acclaimed in 1962 when he was just 24. Now the all-but-forgotten William Melvin Kelley looks set to be a publishing sensation again, just over a year after he died aged 79.

This week will see the reissue in Britain of A Different Drummer, Kelley’s critically lauded debut, which saw the ambitious young author compared to everyone from James Baldwin to William Faulkner. Kelley is credited with being the first person to use the term “woke” in a 1962 article for the New York Times headlined “If You’re Woke You Dig It”, and has been hailed by the New Yorker as the “lost giant of American literature”.

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