Upgrade to a better browser, please.
Ismael Reed
| Full Name: |
Ishmael
Scott
Reed |
| Born: |
February 22, 1938
Chattanooga, TN |
| Occupation: |
Author |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Links: |
|
Biography
Ishmael Reed, together with Toni Morrison, is one of today's pre-eminent African American literary figures--perhaps the most widely reviewed since Ralph Ellison, and, along with Samuel Delany and Amiri Baraka, probably the most controversial.
Ishmael Reed began writing his own jazz column for Empire State, a weekly African American newspaper in Buffalo, NY
Since the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, in 1967, Reed has thus far produced seven novels, four books of poetry, two collections of essays, numerous reviews and critical articles, and has edited two major anthologies. Reed's literary style is best known for its use of parody and satire in attempts to create new myths and to challenge the formal conventions of literary tradition. Reed's works have alternately been criticized as incoherent, muddled, and abstruse, and hailed as multicultural, revolutionary, vivid, and containing a deep awareness of mythic archetypes.
Born 1938 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Ishmael Reed grew up in working class neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York. He attended Buffalo public schools and the University of Buffalo. He moved to New York City,where he cofounded the East Village Other (1965), an underground newspaper that achieved a national reputation. Also that year he organized the American Festival of Negro Art. As well as being a novelist, poet, and essayist, he is a songwriter, television producer, publisher, magazine editor, playwright, and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation and There City Cinema, both of which are located in northern California. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, and he has been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley,
Works in the WWEnd Database
Non Series Works |
| (1972) |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Full Details
