Assigned as part of a contemporary novels course in the spring of 1970, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was unlike anything I had previously encountered. The lively tone and style were a kind of pre-rap, I suppose, as were the content. He was amusing in a way Leroi Jones wasn't and also an example that we can be free of having to "write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago," as Kurt Vonnegut put it.
He certainly introduced a new world to my essentially suburban Midwestern nature.
Reed was, as critic Anita Felicelli wrote of a later novel, a firebrand, crackling, overflowing, pugnacious, "someone who doesn't care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating." In other words, right up my alley.
The novel Mumbo Jumbo confirmed my impression, but, somehow, I haven't encountered him since, even though he's written and published prolifically. Note to self: Rectify ASAP.
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