In 1962, aged just 24, William Melvin Kelley's debut novel A Different Drummer earned him critical comparisons to James Baldwin and William Faulkner. Fifty-five years later, author and journalist Kathryn Schulz happened upon the novel serendipitously and was inspired to write the New Yorker article 'The Lost Giant of American Literature', included as a foreword to this edition. June, 1957. One afternoon, in the backwater town of Sutton, a young black farmer by the name of Tucker Caliban matter-of-factly throws salt on his field, shoots his horse and livestock, sets fire to his house and...

At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world.

The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlows pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.

A Drop of Patience is the story a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart - by blindness, by race, by talent - who...