William Melvin Kelley

While a student at Harvard, Kelley was awarded the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing, for a short story entitled "The Poker Party." Kelley was also a teacher and writing instructor. His academic appointments included a stint 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. Daddy Peaceful is loosely autobiographical, while Dis/integration is a meta-fiction taking up from his last published book, dunfords travels everywheres (1970), and containing another novel-within called Death Fall, about a small Kansas town facing a drug epidemic, that features no black characters. For Kathryn Schulz, writing in The New Yorker in 2018, Kelley is "the lost giant of American literature". ==Personal life==

William Melvin Kelley was born on November 1, 1937, at Seaview Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island in New York City, where his mother, Narcissa Agatha Garcia Kelley, was a patient. His father William was for many years the editor of the Amsterdam News and his family was involved in the Methodist Episcopal church. Kelley grew up in the working-class Italian-American neighbourhood of The Bronx, with his parents and his maternal grandmother, a seamstress, who was the daughter of an enslaved African and a Confederate colonel. where he studied under John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish. Kelley's mother died during his sophomore year and his father when he was a senior. Kelley unsuccessfully switched majors four times and dropped out in 1960, six months before graduation, to become a writer. Originally, the family had plans to move on from Paris to Francophone Africa, but relocated to Jamaica instead, where they lived for nearly a decade. Having rediscovered the Bible, Kelley and his family embraced Judaism. In 1977, nearly penniless, they moved back to New York to a derelict six-floor walkup at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue, and later to the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem. ==Death==

Kelley died in Manhattan on February 1, 2017, due to complications from kidney failure. He was 79. ==Bibliography==