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Novelist, poet, playwright, songwriter, essayist, activist and MacArthur genius, Ishmael Reed has been a major figure in American letters for the past four decades. His ground-breaking literary output has inspired generations of artists and writers - from Thomas Pynchon, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead, to 2pac, George Clinton and David Murray - and he is widely recognized as one of the great American writers. Reed was born in 1938. He grew up in working-class neighbourhoods in Buffalo, New York, attended Buffalo public schools, and the University of Buffalo. He taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and, for thirty-five years, at the University of California Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches at the California College of the Arts.
Praise for Mumbo Jumbo in Penguin Modern Classics: A dazzling classic ... exhilarating ... like jazz, the novel feels improvisatory and ambitious [...] It is a funny book about conspiracy theories that nonetheless feels serious and true. A philosophical and ingenious American race satire * Guardian * Ishmael Reed's extraordinary and expansive collage novel [is] a conduit for his surging torrent of interrelating arguments about race, religion, history, music and literature ... it reminds readers of the charged relationship between medium and message, issuing an avant-garde challenge to read and to think as innovatively as they way in which the novel is written. Mumbo Jumbo is urgent, imaginative, hilarious, and deeply attuned to the exigencies of social and cultural capital * Times Literary Supplement * Groundbreaking ... Ishmael Reed is a major figure in American letters * The Paris Review *
