A Different Drummer (novel)


A Different Drummer is the 1962 debut novel of William Melvin Kelley. It won the John Hay Whitney Foundation Award and Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The title comes from Henry David Thoreau: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer..."

Story

Published at the peak of the civil rights movement, the story outlines an imagined day when the entire black population of a small town in the southern US decide to pack up, destroy their belongings, and leave. The "different drummer" is represented by a young African American man called Tucker Caliban, who salts his farmland, burns down his house, then leads the exodus.

Structure

The book contains 11 chapters, and the narrative is often told from the viewpoint of the town's white inhabitants.