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Reed, Ishmael
5 articles on Reed, Ishmael
Reed, Ishmael
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1112 Includes: Bibliography(b. 22 February 1938), writer, educator, cultural activist, and publisher. Ishmael Scott was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Henry Lenoir, a fund-raiser for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and Thelma Coleman, a department store salesperson. Thelma Coleman later married Bennie Reed, an automobile factory worker, and he gave Ishmael his surname. The family moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1942, and Reed attended Buffalo Technical High School from 1952 to 1954 and graduated from East High School in 1956.Reed had begun composing stories in the second grade, and by age fourteen he had started contributing a regular jazz column to a local black newspaper, the Empire Star Weekly. Reed studied briefly at Millard Fillmore College in Buffalo and then transferred to the State University of New York at ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 447 Includes: Bibliography1938–
African American novelist, journalist, poet, satirist of Western culture and critic of Eurocentrism. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Ishmael Reed was raised and educated in Buffalo, New York, where he attended the University of Buffalo from 1956 to 1960. He began his studies in the night school division, but was persuaded to switch to the day school when an English teacher saw talent in his short satirical story “Something Pure.”After moving to the Lower East Side of New York in 1962, Reed began to write professionally. As a journalist he wrote for the Empire Star Weekly and later edited the weekly Advance. Reed was also involved in the creation of the East Village Other, a prototype of modern underground newspapers. In 1967 he published his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers,Ralph ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 2194 Includes: Further Reading(22 Feb. 1938– ), writer, was born Ishmael Scott Reed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Thelma Coleman, a saleslady. Coleman never married Reed's natural father, Henry Lenoir, a fund-raiser for the YMCA, but before 1940 she married an-autoworker, Bennie Reed, whose surname Ishmael-received. (Ishmael has seven siblings and half siblings.) Coleman moved with her children to Buffalo, New York, in 1942, where Reed attended two different high schools before graduating in 1956; he also made his initial forays into journalism by writing a jazz column in a local black newspaper, the Empire Star, while still a teenager.Reed began his college studies in evening courses at the University of Buffalo but ascended to the more rigorous daytime curriculum when an instructor read one of his short stories, in which Reed satirized the Second Coming ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 2877 Includes: Early Years | Major Works | Controversy and Later Work | Works | Further ReadingAmong contemporary African-American writers, Ishmael Reed is one of the most innovative, prolific, and controversial. To date he has published nine novels, five collections of poems, four collections of essays, and four plays. He has also authored three television productions, an opera, and a “gospera.” Some of his poetry has been set to music and produced on record. A sampling of his fiction, poetry, and essays has been collected in The Reed Reader (2000). As a teacher, a cultural activist, and especially an editor and publisher, Reed has been an advocate of multiculturalism in American literature since the early 1970s. His experimental work, which draws from myth, history, popular culture, and African-American oral culture, can be classified as “populist postmodernist.” The most characteristic attribute of his work is its aggressive, provocative, and sometimes outrageous humor. ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 2460(b. 1938), poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, anthologist, publisher, and cultural activist. Ishmael Reed is one of the most original and controversial figures in the field of African American letters.Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on 22 February 1938, but he grew up in Buffalo, New York. After graduating from high school in 1956, he enrolled as a night student at Millard Fillmore College but transferred to the University of Buffalo as a day student with the assistance of an English teacher who was impressed with a story Reed had written. For financial reasons, however, Reed eventually withdrew without taking a degree. He remained in Buffalo for some time, working as a correspondent for the Empire Star Weekly, a black community newspaper, and serving as cohost of a local radio program that ...
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