Ishmael Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1938, but shortly thereafter his family moved into a working class neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. Ishmael attended public grade schools in Buffalo and went on to enroll at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After graduating in 1960, he moved to New York City where he co-founded the East Village Other (1965)—an underground newspaper that received national attention. Reed published his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers in 1967 and has since devoted his life to writing fiction, poetry, essays and plays.
Since the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers , Reed has devoted himself to the production of a substantial body of literature- -fiction, poetry and essays--which has as its consistent objective the satirizing of American political, religious and literary repression. His literary subversion has expressed itself in parodies of political realities: the racism and greed of the Reagan era in The Terrible Twos (1982) and the recent Japanese by Spring (1993); fundamentalist Christian white supremacist values in The Terrible Threes (1989) and parodies of literary forms themselves; western pulp novels in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969); slave narratives in Flight To Canada (1976); and detective fiction in Mumbo Jumbo (1972) which pits proponents of rationalism and militarism against believers in the magical and intuitive. In 1974, Reed was awarded the Guggenheim Memorial Award for Fiction. For his book The Last Days of Louisiana Red , a book published in 1972, he won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1975.
Mumbo Jumbo (1972) was the work that first achieved wide notoriety for the author, and it is considered by several scholars to be his best, along with Flight to Canada (1976). Two of Reed's books have been nominated for National Book Awards, and he has received numerous honors, fellowships, and prizes, including the Lewis H. Michaux Literary Prize, awarded to him in 1978 by the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Reed has taught English and writing at prestigious universities throughout the country—Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and for the past twenty years, the University of California at Berkeley. Reed and his wife, Clara Blank, currently live in Oakland, California. |
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