ISHMAEL REED (b.1938)

Ishmael Reed is one of today's preeminent AfroAmerican literary figures--perhaps the most widely reviewed since Ralph Ellison, and, along with Amiri Baraka, probably the most controversial. Since the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, in 1967, Reed has thus far produced seven novels, four books of poetry, two collections of essays, numerous reviews and critical articles, and has edited two major anthologies. Reed's literary style is best known for its use of parody and satire in attempts to create new myths and to challenge the formal conventions of literary tradition. Reed's works have alternately been criticized as incoherent, muddled, and abstruse, and hailed as multicultural, revolutionary, vivid, and containing a deep awareness of mythic archetypes.

This original typescript for Mumbo Jumbo, Reed's third novel, was heavily corrected by the author and the editor. The typescript includes Reed's "Style Sheet," which provides clues about the author's arrangement and uses of verb tense, punctuation, discourse, numbers, and capitalization. This typescript is part of a comprehensive collection of Ishmael Reed's Papers in the Manuscript Collection in the University of Delaware Library's Special Collections Department.

Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), also exhibited here, was the work that first achieved wide notoriety for the author, and it is considered by several scholars to be his best, along with Flight to Canada (1976). Mumbo Jumbo is a mythic/magic epic centered in places like New Orleans and Harlem during the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The story depicts the struggle between Jes Grew, the black cultural impulse, and Western monotheistic tradition, which Reed calls the Atonists. Reed incorporates illustrations, footnotes and bibliographies in parody of the documentary conventions of black realism. The dust jacket for Mumbo Jumbo was designed by Reed and Allen Weinberg.