I like Ishmael Reed. There is so much of him. He is going on forty-six at the time I write, is still healthy and pugnacious, and has already incarnated himself in more forms than two normal men do in a lifetime…. Not everyone likes him as much as I do. Some call him too conservative. Some call him unreadable. Some call him silly and superficial. But he is so active and productive in so many fields of contemporary American art that he cannot be ignored. In the late sixties, when he was one of a couple dozen young black writers seeking an audience in that atmosphere of black revolutionary chic, he came on as a kind of enfant terrible. Yet, even at the time, before we knew better, his revolution didn't seem that much different from that of William Melvin Kelley, or Ronald Fair, or John O. Killens. Now it is clear that he was not created by a movement or a time. He has survived the ways of publishers who, perhaps for their own survival, will not print what they assume will not sell—and black literary anger has not sold for some time.
Reed is an artist of many talents with a clear and consistent world view and a vision of America that is both affectionate and critical. In the six books of prose fictional satire he has so far written, he pieces that vision together in a style that is sometimes lyrical and poetic, sometimes flat and unimaginative.
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