Word: reed
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...began his college education at the University of Buffalo's night school, supporting himself as a clerk in the public library during the day. Reed had begun creative writing at the age of 14, and one of his short stories turned out to be his ticket out of night school and into the bachelor of arts curriculum at the University of Buffalo...
...satirical story, "Something Pure," in which the Second Coming is incarnated in an advertising agent whose unorthodox sales techniques earn him hatred and ridicule, alerted an English professor to Reed's gifts as a storyteller and parodist...
While a student at the university from 1956 to 1960, Reed developed his pastiche style, he says, as a result of the contradictory influences of traditional canonical English professors and linguists who helped him understand the potential of Afro-American vernacular in literature...
...Reed withdrew from the college for financial reasons and moved into Buffalo's low-income Black housing projects to define himself "against the artificial social and class distinctions associated with American university education," he says. Life there was "a horrible experience" because of his growing awareness that no individual, no matter how well-intentioned, could change these basic conditions of poverty. This experience led Reed to a period of intense political activism during the late civil rights movement and the early stages of the Black power movement...
Currently, Reed chooses not to be involved in any overtly political activity, but his novels continue to wrestle with social problems. "`Political' doesn't mean anything anymore," he says. "When a novelist takes on social issues, his work is dismissed as a diatribe, not taken seriously." More than American apathy, Reed criticizes the "white elitist media" for being overly "under-class happy...