Literary Significance and Reception
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was received with varied criticisms: "Neil Schmitz, in an essay on Reed's fiction in Twentieth Century Literature (Apr. 1974), judged Yellow Back Radio to exhibit a “simplistic” focus and “diffused” energy, although many readers found it to be a comic tour de force."
- "Ishmael Reed is a most talented humorist and possessor of a powerfully antic and lyric imagination...Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down should be read as hard evidence of Reed's uncommon talent." The New Yorker
- "Ishmael Reed has mastered the vocabulary of blasphemy. He skins all our sacred cows." Life Magazine
- "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a full blown 'horse opera,' a surrealistic spoof of the Western with Indian chiefs aboard helicopters, stagecoaches and closed circuit TVs, cavalry charges of taxis." New York Review of Books
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