"The most revolutionary black novelist who has appeared in print thus far," wrote Nick Aaron Ford as early as 1971, "is Ishmael Reed ." Nick Aaron Ford, one of the elder statesmen of Afro-American literary criticism, could make this bold judgment of Reed's place in the black canon after Reed had published only his first two experimental novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). With the publication of what several scholars consider the two most sustained works in Reed's oeuvre, Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Flight to Canada (1976), Ford's startling claim would seem much less hyperbolic. Ishmael Reed, author of sixnovels, four books of poems, two collections of essays, and editor and publisher of several anthologies, stands at age forty-six as one of the cardinal figures in the Afro-American literary tradition.

Reed's place in the tradition is, however, both unique and somewhat ironic. For Reed has chosen to establish his...