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Race Relations Institute, Fisk University The Race Relations Institute was founded in 1942 by Dr. Charles S. Johnson, a famed sociologist and the founding editor of the National Urban League’s official organ, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, where he worked from 1923 to 1928. The institute began as a series of seminars Johnson inaugurated as forums for social scientists, educators, clergy, and other leaders to discuss ways to advance racial equality and the issue of race vis-à-vis economics, employment, education, housing, and so on. Its stated mission is “to heighten awareness among all people about the divisive and insidious nature of racism.”* Beyond the annual one-week seminars on race that carry its name, the institute also holds lectures, symposia, community forums, and workshops and connects scholars via its WILDER (World Institute for Learning, Discussing, and Evaluating Race Relationships) Internet listserv. It is also responsible for the HOLDINGS Project (Holding Our Library Documents Insures Nobility, Greatness, and Strength), the Du Bois/Nash Lecture series, and other gatherings as current events demand. Under the psychologist Dr. Raymond A. Winbush in the 1990s, the institute took a more Afrocentric turn, focusing on current pressing issues in the development and deterioration of African American communities. The RRI has consulted widely with organizations such as the U.S. Justice Department, the United Auto Workers, numerous universities and colleges, InterMedia, Inc., and the U.S. Army, the U.S. Congress, and the White House. Dr. Winbush left the institute for Morgan State’s Institute for Urban Research in 2003.
Reed, Ishmael (b. February 22, 1938, Chattanooga, Tennessee) Ishmael Reed’s output, influence, and controversy are nearly unequaled in post-1970 African American literature. He has authored nine novels, five books of poetry, and three plays. He has also edited five anthologies, three compilations of his own essays, one retrospective of his career to date (The Reed Reader, 2000), and numerous compilations of his and other writers’ fiction, poetry, and essays. Equally important, Reed has been instrumental in starting or furthering the careers of both new and established African American authors, including Al Young, Gloria Naylor, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Cade Bambara, Jill Nelson, Nelson George, Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and many others. All of these authors have either been published in Reed’s magazines, including The Yardbird Reader (1972–76), Y’Bird (1977), Quilt (1981), Konch (1991–present), or have been the recipients of the American Book Award, which is bestowed by the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization devoted to promoting the art of American multicultural writers that Reed cofounded in 1976. Moreover, Reed has been a consistent advocate for a number of African American authors whose work has not gained as much notice as it might deserve, including Cecil Brown, John A. Williams, and John Oliver Killens; he also publishes Vines magazine (1999–present), which serves as an outlet for college students’ publications. It would be fair, therefore, to argue that Reed has been as important in shaping contemporary African American literature as Toni Morrison, in her capacity as an editor at Random House, despite the controversy Reed has garnered over the years.
Much of this controversy stems from several key factors that touch upon the whole of the contemporary period. First, Reed is nothing if not an iconoclast, a description that guarantees that he will, and does, offend many. Second, Reed’s ideological positions on various issues are often shifting and difficult to determine. He has been quite consistent, however, in defending the culture, literature, and lives of the African Diaspora from monoculturalists’ assaults. In the 1980s and 1990s especially, Reed has defended black male figures as different as Clarence Thomas, O. J. Simpson, and Rodney King from attacks that bear the imprimatur of racists and their stereotypes about black men and their sexuality, the same stereotypes that destroyed lives and careers since the beginning of chattel slavery. As Bruce Dick has put it, Reed “has received more critical attention than almost any other contemporary African American male writer” due to his “contentions and changing position as a black man in a traditionally hostile, racist environment,” and these changes can befuddle anyone trying to create an overarching view of his career.*
Third, Reed has become notorious for his relentless criticism of contemporary feminists and has engaged in long battles with Michele Wallace, Susan Brown Miller, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, and many others. Reed accuses these critics and authors of being complicit, even actively interested, in destroying the images and work of African American males. Finally, Reed’s primary mode of writing, if the number and content of his books are of any account, is as a satirist, which ensures that he will court controversy and outrage.
These factors notwithstanding, it would be impossible either to overestimate or to dismiss Reed’s body of work, particularly his early novels. He has earned a number of awards and fellowships for his work, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1996), and was nominated in 1973 for two categories of the National Book Award, in fiction for Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and in poetry for Chattanooga (1973). Chattanooga was also nominated the same year for the Pulitzer Prize. His papers from 1964 to 1995 are now housed in the University of Delaware’s library.
Reed has steadfastly refused to fit within prevalent notions of what an African American author should write about, both as a creative artist and cultural critic, especially when faced with criticism from the African American critical community. Reed considers the “average Afro-American” to be living “in an ideological cloud. What’s happening in New York and New England is a power struggle … over [white] liberal patronage among Afro-American writers and intellectuals.”* Mumbo Jumbo (1972; see separate entry) represents Reed’s largely satirical interpretation of this power struggle as it manifested itself in both the 1960s and during the Harlem Renaissance, including the effects it has had on African American life, art, and culture. Reed sees a reproduction of the monocultural impulse ingrained in Western cultures in the black aesthetic’s developments in the early 1970s that threatens to curb intellectual, cultural, and artistic freedom. Although Reed was an advocate of the black aesthetic’s more inclusive approach to African American art, his novel reveals the extent to which this approach was being stifled by ideological orthodoxy. One of Reed’s key arguments is that African American radicals, like other revolutionaries before and since, are just as susceptible to the temptations of the society they struggle against, primarily because they are still very much part of those societies. Complete separatism is virtually impossible, so long as the cultural and political ideologies of the oppressive society remain within the minds of the separatists.
Even if separatism is not a viable option, finding an aesthetic that allows for true artistic freedom is an excruciatingly slow and complex process. One ironic trope in Mumbo Jumbo concerns the practically inevitable ideological compromises that follow when African Americans in a new cultural phase try to find their place by seeking white patronage. This is a trope that touches many characters, scenes, and actions within the text. Through such characters as Abdul Sufi Hamid, Hinckle Von Vampton, Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, and Papa LaBas, Reed satirizes such time-honored ideological constructs as Black Nationalism and Western dualism as the cultural bases for racism. Mumbo Jumbo succeeds partially because the satirical spirit is not without some ambivalence. Though Reed satirizes the above ideologies, he also lends each at least a small degree of veracity, if only to demonstrate the ambivalence found within any culture. His objection is to the idea that any single staid, immutable ideology is capable of resolving social problems; in fact, any such ideology is doomed to fail, since it does not allow for new input.
In the place of monoculturalism, Reed substitutes his “Neo-HooDoo aesthetic,” modeled upon the syncretism of vodun/ voodoo. Hoodoo is one of the names for the religions people of African descent practice throughout Diaspora based upon West African religions, especially Yoruban forms. It combines the pantheons of gods and spirits—loa—of these religions with the basic structure of Roman Catholicism; it also incorporates the mysticism and magical rites of both religions. The vodun/hoodoo pantheon is generally divided into two major categories: the Rada and Petro loa. The former are generally benevolent and warm; the latter are more mysterious but may range from malevolent to the benevolent. The Petro loa include a number of tricksters, most prominently Legba Attibon, sometimes called Papa Legba or Papa LaBas; all are translations of the Yoruban trickster god Esu-elegbara into the terms of African Diasporic peoples. In Zora Neale Hurston’s* analysis of Haitian “VooDoo” mythology, Legba/LaBas is “the god of the gate” who holds “the way to all things … in his hands” (Hurston, Tell My Horse [(1938) New York: Perennial, 1990], 128). “Every service to whatever loa for whatever purpose,” therefore, “must be preceded by a service to Legba” (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 128). Papa LaBas serves a similar purpose in Mumbo Jumbo as the hoodoo trickster. His goal in the novel is to help “Jes Grew”* find its text. Jes Grew is a new loa and pandemic disease that causes its carriers to begin dancing, singing, and generally appreciating black folk culture.
The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) is a fantastic novel extending many of the motifs found in Mumbo Jumbo, as Reed uses the protagonist Ed Yellings to indict revolutionary groups of the Black Power era for their insincerity, violent rhetoric and tactics, and occasional criminal behavior. Papa LaBas reprises his role as a hoodoo detective trying to bring the anarchic advocates of Moochism/“Louisiana Red”—Reed’s euphemism for questionable ideologies and their followers—to mend their ways and return to the hoodoo aesthetic of antideterminism that Reed generally advocates. Last Days is also the novel that brought a substantial degree of criticism from feminists, black and white alike, for its often mean-spirited lampooning and stereotyping of the contemporary women’s movement and its members.
Flight to Canada (1976) is, after Mumbo Jumbo, arguably Reed’s greatest achievement, a mix of fantasy, science fiction, and postmodern irreverence for generic boundaries and conventions. One of the many neo–slave narratives published since 1970, Flight to Canada is a direct response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s historic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose story, Reed demonstrates, was stolen from an African American. This act is Reed’s metaphor for the ways in which African Americans have seen their voices, ideas, and achievements appropriated, co-opted, or stolen outright. The protagonist, Raven Quickskill, is a poet and former slave who seeks his own Canada, a metaphor for fleeting and ultimately unreachable freedom and justice. Over the course of the novel’s plot, Reed satirizes traditional readings of American history (especially the iconic place of Abraham Lincoln), Richard Nixon, literary critics, Black Nationalism, and even the protest strategies of the same slave narratives whence Reed draws his inspiration.
Despite Reed’s objections to the label of being a “postmodern” writer, his novels in the 1970s provide excellent examples of both ironic revision and theories of postmodernism at work, insofar as they revise vast swathes of history using pastiche, parody, irony, and satire. Reed would rather be called a “neo-hoodoo” artist; that is, an artist whose work syncretically draws upon the characters, cultures, and morals of the pantheons of African Diasporic religions, especially vodun, as well as “European … African, Native-American [and] Afro-American” influences.* Via these figures, Reed’s early novels challenge us to look past Western epistemologies to perceive, appreciate, and adopt the social and ethical systems of the Diaspora, thus allowing us glimpses into entirely new and richly referential views of history. Reed’s novels of the 1980s and 1990s, however, differ in slight but noticeable ways in style and content from his earlier work. Reed is less concerned with inserting countless references to mythical and historical events and figures that populate Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, nor does he utilize the “neo-hoodoo Aesthetic” at the same level of consistency as his earlier novels. Reed’s attacks upon numerous enemies—real or imagined—escalate in these works, fueled by criticism of ideological issues within Reed’s work and confrontations he has had with various feminists and literary critics of different stripes, all of which are reflected in his critical essays, reviews, and interviews of a particular moment. While he is still clearly concerned with the problem of Western ideas dominating American intellectual and cultural discourse, Reed’s later novels concentrate upon two general topics: first, the advent of neoconservatism in recent years and its effects on racial and cultural politics; second, the philosophical relativism that can result when the concept of multiculturalism is misapplied by inept academicians. These later works are products of what Reed calls the “Writin’ is Fightin’” stage of his career, a phrase that comes from the title of one of Reed’s essay collections, which is in turn a quotation from boxer Muhammad Ali, who realized the importance, as did countless African Americans before him, of the potential of words to become weapons. As a result of this shift, the line between Reed’s polemical essays and his fiction became more blurred with each subsequent novel. Lengthy, biting diatribes against racists on the Left and Right, radical feminists, and monoculturalists could be found in Reed’s novels and essays of this period. Set in the 1980s, The Terrible Twos (1982) and its sequel The Terrible Threes (1989) form an extended, elaborate vision of American political conservatism as a reductio ad absurdum. In the novels’ contexts, the principles underlying American politics, most prominently capitalism and jingoism, are stripped of their coded manifestations and placed within characters who cynically understand what the American mainstream really wants and are relatively successful at satisfying those demands. Put simply, the American people (and, by extension, their leaders) are the equivalent of two-year-olds throwing tantrums and in need of stern—or at least satiric—discipline (Terrible Twos, 23–24). The metaphor of the two-year-old as representative of American political and social concerns continually resurfaces throughout the text, primarily through the presence of Dean Clift (a composite character whose name is taken from the 1950s matinee idols James Dean and Montgomery Clift, and who is based in part on Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy), a former actor elected to the United States vice presidency not for his political skills, which are nonexistent, but for his good looks. When his running mate, former General Walter Scott dies in office, Clift succeeds to the presidency and subsequently finds himself acting as a figurehead for the reactionary politicians who bankrolled his election campaign. They then write the platform undergirding Clift’s presidency, which becomes the novel’s central concern and the primary site for exploration of American racial politics. “Operation Two Birds” is a wildly elaborate conspiracy that would consolidate power for a small, fascist elite of white men by convincing the American public that the “surps,” or surplus people (read: people of color) are destroying both the country and the world.* The Terrible Twos tracks the unraveling of this plot and the efforts of numerous characters to derail it; The Terrible Threes is the chronicle of the plotters’ attempts to hide the plot from the public, who were exposed to it at the end of the former novel. Darryl Pinckney argues that “Reed’s campaign to mention everything that has gone wrong in America results in a narrative that is all over the place, as if he were trying to work in everything from crime against the environment to offenses against the homeless. Instead of suspense or satire one is confronted with an extended editorial rebuttal.”*
Reckless Eyeballing (1986), which was published between the Terribles and Japanese by Spring (1993), is another satirical extension of Reed’s discourses on American politics practiced in his essays and articles in Writin is Fightin ’ and is easily his most controversial novel. Reed satirizes certain feminists—including, in a very thinly veiled pseudonym, Alice Walker—as cynical, manipulative women, equally as enthralled by misanthropy and racist images of black men as the men they critique are enthralled by misogyny. Upon its publication, Reckless Eyeballing stoked an uproar and backlash against his work that continues to the present. The novel chronicles the exploits of Ian Ball and Tremonisha Smarts, two black writers trying to court the favor of the feminists currently in vogue and in power. Their desire for fortune and fame lead them to assimilation and, consequently, the evisceration of their cultural backgrounds. The most galling part of this move is that Ball and Smarts are assimilating into an artistic world that is condescending toward them at best and contemptuous at worst. Again, Reed issued similar warnings previously in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Mumbo Jumbo, but here the enemy is not Black Nationalism; rather, it is the materialism of the black middle class in the post–Civil Rights era and the crass materialism of the 1980s that indirectly causes black art and culture to suffer. This is best expressed through Reed’s thinly veiled caricature of Alice Walker, Tremonisha Smarts, who reveals that many of the critics who praised her play about abusive black men “took some of these characters and made them out to be all black men” and therefore used the characters as excuses “to hate all black men” (129–30).
Through its updating of the problems of academic racism and intellectual cooptation for the 1990s, Japanese by Spring is largely a revision of Reckless Eyeballing. It makes Reed’s ideology increasingly explicit via the introduction of Reed himself as an eponymous character, one who actively contributes invective material to the novel’s plot and discursive strategies. Reed confronts the reader with the same type of hard historical evidence that buoys his previous novels but without the subtler mediative function that his other characters have served. Moreover, the eponymic stratagem may be a sardonic attempt to make Reed’s personal views entirely lucid to a critical audience that has frequently attacked his satire, especially Reckless Eyeballing. Japanese By Spring represents Ishmael Reed’s concatenation of the intensely fierce debates over the meaning of multiculturalism in U.S. academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, offering in novel form Reed’s vision of what a productive, transcendent multiculturalism should be, as opposed to what it has become in the face of American cynicism. The novel’s setting, fictional Jack London College in Oakland, California, is ultimately a synecdochal representation of American academia, in which established, nearly unquestioned racist beliefs, as well as a marked lack of moral courage and minimal intelligence, undergird some of the multicultural debates’ primary players. The solution to these debates is for the public at large to realize how mainstream American culture is always already multicultural. Via his eponymous character, Reed posits a multiculturalism that is neither faddish nor materialistic, which will help restore the integrity and strength of progressive racial and cultural politics.
Scholarship on Reed is nearly as voluminous as his own fictional, poetic, and critical output, despite his periodic claims that his work has been ignored or persecuted. Reed is mentioned or discussed in virtually every major book-length work on contemporary African American fiction published (see bibliography). In addition, his work has been collected several times over. The best and most recent such collection is Reed’s own The Reed Reader (2000), which contains an incendiary introduction that reviews Reed’s career to date, excerpts from all of his novels, plays, poetry, and books of essays. The Reed Reader’s natural complement may be found in two recent books: Conversations with Ishmael Reed (1995; interviews coedited by Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh) and The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed (1998; reviews and critical essays edited by Bruce Dick with the assistance of Pavel Zemliansky). Elizabeth and Thomas Settle, Ishmael Reed: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1982), remains the most exhaustive bibliography of Reed’s career published in book form, although it is clearly outdated.
Critical studies include: Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (1987); Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (1988); Santiago Juan-Navarro, Re-contextualizing Historiographic Metafiction in the Americas: The Examples of Carlos Fuentes, Ishmael Reed, Julio Cortázar, and E. L. Doctorow (1995); Patrick McGee, Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (1997).
Notable journal articles include: Joe Weixlmann, “African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major,” MELUS 17, no. 4 (Winter 1991–1992); Sami Ludwig, “Ishmael Reed’s Inductive Narratology of Detection,” AAR 32, no. 3 (Autumn 1998); Daniel Punday, “Ishmael Reed’s Rhetorical Turn: Uses of ‘Signifying’ in Reckless Eyeballing,” College English 54, no. 4 (April 1992); Neil Schmitz, “Neo-HooDoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmael Reed,” Twentieth Century Literature 20, no. 2 (April 1974); Chester J. Fontenot, “Ishmael Reed and the Politics of Aesthetics, or Shake Hands and Come Out Conjuring,” BALF 12, no. 1 (Spring 1978); James Lindroth, “Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the HooDoo Trickster,” AAR 30, no. 2 (Summer 1996); Sharon Jessee, “Ishmael Reed’s Multi-Culture: The Production of Cultural Perspective,” MELUS 13, nos. 3–4 (Autumn-Winter 1986) and “Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” MELUS 21, no. 4 (Winter 1996); Carol Siri Johnson,“The Limbs of Osiris: Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Hollywood’s The Mummy,” MELUS 17, no. 4 (Winter 1991–1992); Madge Ambler, “Ishmael Reed: Whose Radio Broke Down?” NALF 6, no. 4 (Winter 1972); Ann duCille,“Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical I,’” Callaloo 16, no. 3 (Summer 1993). Finally, Callaloo 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1994) contains a special section on Reed.
Rhodes, Jewell Parker (b. February 12, 1954, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) Novelist and short-fiction author Jewell Parker Rhodes is a professor of creative writing at Arizona State University, where she used to head its MFA program. She started publishing her work in the late 1980s; she has been included in such anthologies as Gloria Naylor’s Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995) and Charles Rowell’s Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe (1995). Her stories and novels focus upon a diverse set of topics, but all are characterized by deeply introspective and fully drawn characters Her first novel, Voodoo Dreams (1995), retells the life of legendary New Orleans voodoo/hoodoo practitioner Marie Laveau. Magic City (1998) is a fictionalized retelling of the Tulsa Riot of 1921, in which the African American community of Deep Greenwood was bombed from the air. The narrative centers upon Joe Samuels, an African American man who tries to escape from the mob attempting to lynch him after he is falsely accused of raping a white woman. He is aided by another white woman, Mary Keane, which leads to a number of tensions as each comes to terms with his or her respective identity. In the process, Rhodes gives immediacy to one of the worst and least known incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.
The masterpiece of Rhodes’ career thus far is her 2002 historical novel, Douglass’ Women [sic], which won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book award (2003), the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles award (2003), and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association award for fiction (2003). It was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for fiction (2002). It explores and imagines the lives and emotions of Anna Murray Douglass and Ottilie Assing, the two most significant women in the life of fugitive slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Anna, a free woman of color who became Douglass’s first wife once he was free, was a key player in his ultimate attempt to escape from slavery, yet she is scarcely mentioned in Douglass’s three autobiographies. Assing, on the other hand, was a German heiress who joined the abolitionist movement and became one of Douglass’s closest confidantes and mistress for many years, yet she similarly received little notice in Douglass’s published writings. Douglass’ Women has been roundly and justifiably praised for its sensitivity to the lives of two women who were instrumental in making Douglass into a legendary figure yet were nearly forgotten and silenced by history.
A special section of Callaloo 20, no. 2 (Spring 1997) was devoted to Rhodes’s work, including an excerpt from Magic City and an interview. She was also interviewed in AAR 29, no. 4 (Winter 1995). Other essays and short fiction appear in: Creative Nonfiction, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Feminist Studies, CITYAZ, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Rhodes has also received a Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction, and she was selected as writer-in-residence for the National Writer’s Voice Project.
Ross, Fran (Frances Dolores; b. June 25, 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d. September 17, 1985, New York City) Novelist, screenwriter, and editor Fran Ross was almost entirely unknown until Northwestern University Press reprinted her only novel, Oreo (1974) in November 2000 with a new preface by Harryette Mullen. The novel received a smattering of reviews and recognition by such talents as comedian Richard Pryor—for whom Ross wrote briefly in 1977—after its initial publication, but it went out of print shortly thereafter, and Ross disappeared into obscurity as a freelance writer until her death.
Oreo stands as one of very few satirical novels written by an African American woman. The eponymous narrator, whose (ironic) birth name is Christine Schwartz, is the child of a Jewish father and African American mother. Her nickname is derived in part from a slang term in African American communities for a black person who is “white” on the inside, like the famous cookie. The novel, however, satirizes such characterizations, as well as various aspects of African American, Jewish American, and simply American culture and literature, with the ancient Greek myth of Theseus as its template. To that end, it defies the sorts of aesthetic principles defined by the Black Arts Movement, which might help explain its obscurity.
Since Oreo came back into print very recently and received no scholarly notice to speak of in the interim, the scholarship is quite limited: Harryette Mullen, “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’: Fran Ross’s Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel,” MELUS 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002); Tobe Levin, “The Challenge to Identity in Jeannette Lander and Fran Ross,” in Commonwealth and American Women’s Discourse: Essays in Criticism, ed. A. L. McLeod (New Delhi: Sterling, 1998).
* Fisk University, “About the Race Relations Institute,” http://www.fisk.edu/index.asp?cat=24&pid=203.
* Bruce Allen Dick and Pavel Zemliansky, The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed, Critical Responses in Arts and Letters 31 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), xix.
* Peter Nazareth, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Iowa Review 13, no. 2, 126.
* Reed includes Hurston, Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into the Native Myths and Magic in Jamaica and Haiti (London: Dent, 1939), in his “Partial Bibliography” for Mumbo Jumbo.
* Reed takes the name of “Jes Grew” from a name James Weldon Johnson assigned to the earliest ragtime songs in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972; New York: Athaneum, 1988), 11.
* Reginald Martin, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 2 (1984): 186.
* Jay Boyer, Ishmael Reed (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1993), 36.
* Roger Matuz et al., eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Today’s Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short Story Writers, and Other Creative Writers, 70 vols. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 60:314.