Theย novelist William Edward Demby Jr. was born in Pittsburgh,ย Pennsylvania, on Christmas day, 1922, to William and Gertrude Demby.ย He was raised in a family of seven children in the Fairywood district of Pittsburghโs West Side. The family moved to Clarksburg, West Virginia, shortly after Demby graduated from Langley High School.
Demby was drafted into theย Army in 1942 while a student atย West Virginia State College, where he studied creative writing with poet and writerย Margaret Walker. During World War II, he served in the 92nd Infantry Division, a segregated unit in Italy and North Africa, and wrote for the Armyโs newspaper,ย Stars and Stripes. Following the war, he attendedย Fisk Universityย under the GI Bill, where he was mentored by poetย Robert Haydenย and Fiskโs librarian,ย Arna Bontemps. Demby graduated in 1947.
Demby spent twenty years in Rome, from 1947 to 1967, working as aย journalist, screenwriter, and English translator of scripts for major directors of the Italian cinema, including Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1953, Demby married Italian poet, translator, and screenwriter Lucia โTatinaโ Drudi, and in 1955 their son James, now a classical music composer and conductor, was born.
Dembyโs first novel,ย Beetlecreekย (1950), was set in an imaginary West Virginia town similar to those he knew from his early life. His second novel,ย The Catacombs, which included actual newspaper headlines and clippings, appeared in 1965.ย Demby moved toย New Yorkย in 1967, where he taught English at the College of Staten Island for the next twenty years.
He continued to visit Italy frequently; however, he went from his home in Sag Harbor, New York, to care for his wife, whose health was failing. While in Italy, the couple lived in a nineteenth-century villa in the Tuscany woods near Florence, which his wife had inherited from an aunt.
Dembyโs third novel, the semi-autobiographicalย Love Story Black (1978), was followed byย Blue Boyย (1980), a novel that has inexplicably disappeared. Demby began writing his fifth and last novel,ย King Comus, in the mid-1980s, which he would not pronounce finished until 2007. One year earlier, in 2006, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award organization.
Upon his retirement from teaching in 1989, Demby continued work onย King Comus, which may well prove to be the last novel written by an African American who served in World War II.ย Demby completed it while living at the Tuscan villa after the death of his wife in 1995.ย ย King Comus was published posthumously byย Ishmael Reed Publishing Company in 2017.
In 2004, Demby married Barbara Morris, a formerย NAACP lawyer whom he had met and dated while they were Fisk University students. They spent his final years in Sag Harbor until Dembyโs death on May 23, 2013, at ninety years of age.
