SOURCE: Green, Geoffrey. “Reality as Art: The Last Days of Louisiana Red.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 2 (summer 1984): 233-37.

In the following essay, Green discusses how Reed's The Last Days of Louisiana Red functions as a work of social commentary.

It has been ten years since the appearance of The Last Days of Louisiana Red. Often the passing of a decade will bring changes in the way we read and thus affect our perception of an author and his work. But although a recent appraisal of Ishmael Reed (in Frederick R. Karl's American Fictions: 1940-1980 [New York: Harper and Row, 1983], 370) states that he “has broken free of restraints of realism, naturalism, expressionism,” most assessments of his work do not reflect this belief. Indeed, in an introduction to a very recent interview (“Straight Talk from Ishmael Reed,” City Arts Monthly, October 1983, 9) David Armstrong makes this exemplary statement: “As in...