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”.

Now his family hopes that there will be renewed enthusiasm for his back catalogue. Kelley published three further novels and a collection of short stories in the space of a decade before turning his back on the US literary scene and moving his family to Jamaica in pursuit of a different life.

“Drummer is really the beginning of a whole world,” his widow, Aiki Kelley, told the Observer. “His later work is often called experimental and difficult but I would say that it’s funny and smart and interesting. He didn’t write like anyone else.”

Jon Butler, the managing director of Quercus, which will publish A Different Drummer in the UK on 1 November, following a seven-way auction for the UK rights, agreed. “Reading Drummer is a bit like finding a bit of buried treasure,” he said. “It’s about the thrill of finding that you’re in on a secret early and being able to tell everyone else why it is that they should read it.”

The hype around Kelley’s debut began after journalist Kathryn Schulz stumbled upon a first edition novel by African-American poet Langston Hughes with an inscription to Kelley written in it. Intrigued as to who Hughes was effusively praising, Schulz wrote an appraisal for the New Yorker earlier this year that praised Kelley’s “impressive range”, noting the comparisons in the 1960s to Isaac Bashevis Singer and James Joyce. Schulz concluded that the key to A Different Drummer’s power lay in the way it imagined “an alternate universe where African Americans wield not less power, but more”.

Kelley celebrating his 38th Birthday in Bull Bay, Jamaica, with daughters Cira and Jesi and wife Aiki. Photograph: Estate of William Melvin Kelley

What is most intriguing about Kelley’s work is the way he chooses to express that power. A Different Drummer, written at the height of the civil rights era when racist segregation laws were still in effect, tells the story of a young African-American farmer named Tucker Caliban who wakes up one morning, salts his fields, slaughters his horse and cows, burns down his house and leaves his unnamed southern state. The rest of the African-American population soon follow him. It is a wholesale rejection of a way of life made all the more powerful by the way in which Kelley’s tale unfolds.

“Kelley’s genius was to write the whole book from the point of view of the white townsfolk left behind,” said Butler. “Their stunned attempts to grapple with this refusal to stick around under the yolk is a scorching indictment of the establishment’s inability to engage with inequality and that still speaks to us today, particularly in the age of Black Lives Matter.”

So why then did this young author, who seemed set for literary fame and fortune, fade from the public eye? The answer, in part, is that it was a conscious decision, and one which has intriguing parallels with Kelley’s best-known novel. “We were followers of Malcolm X,” said Aiki. “The way he thought really impressed us, the construction of his ideas, the questions he asked. Then Malcolm was assassinated and everything fell apart.

“Kelley covered the trial of Malcolm’s killer and in the court the judge made him stand up to illustrate a point. He came home that night and said: ‘I’m a black man with a beard. I’m marked. We’re out of here.” The family moved to Paris, “where we were living when we heard Dr King had been assassinated”, and spent time in Rome, “where we learned that [Robert] Kennedy had been shot. At that point we knew that we didn’t want to raise our family in America.”

The young couple and their two daughters, Jesi and Cira, moved to Jamaica, where they would stay for the next nine years. Aiki said: “The only thing we knew how to be was artists, so we did that every day.

“Kelley wrote and I made art and we taught the children. We always knew that the one thing we didn’t want to be was middle class – we had both grown up in that world and were reacting against it – so we always said we’d be very rich or very poor. As it turned out we were mostly very poor, but it was an adventure.”

The new Quercus edition of Kelley’s book.

Returning to New York in the late 1970s after their visas had expired, they found a different world. “We had been away a long time and publishing had changed,” said Aiki. “It was more about money and sales. Kelley couldn’t get back in the rhythm.”

Their existence remained precarious until 1989 when an old friend, who had long supported Kelley’s work, helped him land a job at Sarah Lawrence College, where he would teach until his death. “I think in some ways he was happy that things turned out that way because he liked his life and he had a great fear of money,” said Aiki. “He did ask me towards the very end if I felt he failed us, but my answer was absolutely not. We had a wonderful life.”

As to what he would have made of the interest in his work, his daughter Jesi laughed. “He would have been very amused,” she said. “And then he would have said it’s been a long time coming. When things were really tight he would say to us: ‘Don’t worry, I‘m sitting on a goldmine.’

“He always felt that public attention would eventually swing back round to him, so I really do feel that he’s up there now looking down and seeing all this attention and laughing, thinking, ‘Didn’t I say that would happen? I was right.’”

• A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley is published by Quercus (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.91 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99