Its success seemed to bode well for a bright authorial future, and in 1964 Kelley's short-story collection, Dancers on the Shore, was published, followed in 1965 by his second novel, A Drop of Patience.

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[7] until his death in 2017.

[8] 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.

[3] 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.

[3][11] 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.

[3] On December 15, 1962, only 8 months after they met again at the Penn Relays, Kelley married Karen Gibson, a young woman from Chicago who was studying art at Sarah Lawrence College to become a painter (she was later to be known by the first name Aiki).

[3] After the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Kelley and his wife decided they did not want to raise their family amidst the US's racial violence.