The Warriors

Description

It's a hot 4th of July night in New York City. In the darkness of the Bronx, thousands of boys have gathered from all across the city. Among them are the warriors of the Coney Island Dominators. Ismael Rivera, leader of the Delancey Thrones, has called an assembly of New York's disparate youth gangs. Why should they keep taking it from the Man when they could be the ones giving it to everyone else? But when the assembly descends into violence, the Dominators are suddenly a very long way home from home. The Warriors follows the Dominators as they rape and murder their way back to Coney Island through the terrifying New York night. First published in 1965, Sol Yurick's bleak and shocking novel is a brutal tale of young men left to raise themselves, and an urgent warning about the animal savagery that emerges from the torn fabric of human society.

Sol Yurick was born in 1925 in New York. The son of Jewish immigrants, Yurick grew up in a politically active working-class household. He enlisted in the Army during the Second World War, then studied literature before taking a job in New York City's welfare department, where he became familiar with the children of welfare families, many of whom belonged to youth gangs. This experience formed the basis for The Warriors, his first and best-known novel. He was a lifelong social activist and lived his whole life in New York; he died in Brooklyn in 2013.

Sol Yurick...was too radical, too extreme and too violent for the respectable literary establishment of New York, yet no writer more fully embodied the city's anguished spirit in the 1960's * Guardian * The best novel of its kind I've read. An altogether perfect achievement. I'm sure that to many it will sound like sacrilege but I have to say I think it a better novel than Lord of The Flies. -- Warren Miller