Reed, Ishmael (Scott)

Reed, Ishmael [Scott] (1938–), Chattanooga‐born black author, long resident in Berkeley, Calif. His experimental novels of preposterous plots marked by fantasy, sometimes surrealistic, sometimes caricatured and satiric, include The Free‐Lance Pallbearers (1967), depicting violence and corruption in a fictive land and satirizing its mistreatment of blacks; Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), presenting the fantastic adventures of a black cowboy; Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a freewheeling tale about black‐white relations over the ages; The Quality of Hurt (1973), containing bitter autobiographical comments on whites; The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), a bizarre tale of black and whites set in Berkeley during the 1960s; Flight to Canada (1976), fusing 19th‐ and 20th‐century characters and situations in a surrealistic presentation of American slavery; Reckless Eyeballing (1980), displaying both humor and horror; and The Terrible Twos (1982), a bitter, satirical fantasy of political and social corruption in the U.S. of today and the future, contained in The Terrible Threes (1989), marked by both terror and humor. Japanese by Spring (1993) satirizes factional struggles and questions of political correctness among the faculty and students of a fictional Oakland college. His poetry is collected in Catechism of the Neo‐American HooDoo Church (1970), Conjure (1972), Chattanooga (1973), Secretary to the Spirits (1978), and New and Collected Poems (1988). Writin' Is Fightin' (1988) gathers editorials, book reviews, and essays. Shrovetime in Old New Orleans (1978) and God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982) are gatherings of essays. Airing Dirty Laundry (1994) collects previously published essays as well as new work, much of it confronting the media for misrepresentations of African‐Americans.