SOURCE: Davis, Robert Murray. “Scatting the Myths: Ishmael Reed.” Arizona Quarterly 39, no. 4 (winter 1983): 406-20.

In the following essay, Davis examines how Reed's use of mythology in his fiction differentiates from similar works by several modernist authors.

dont look at me if all dese niggers are ripping it up like deadwood dick; doing art d way its never been done. 

—“Badman of the Guest Professor”

Ishmael Reed's political and esthetic intransigence might well be responsible for his relative neglect by all critical schools, for in all of his work he has gone out of his way to reject, among others, the New York literary establishment; Jewish critics of Black literature; other Black writers and critics of differing political, esthetic, and even physical hue; and the whole idea of English departments, which, he argues with a logic even more irritating than his ad hominem attacks, should be made part of...