The cult success of ‘The Warriors’ movie (directed by Walter Hill and released in 1979) has distracted attention from Sol Yurick’s original novel but now, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication in 2015, Souvenir Press have published a new edition in their Independent Voices series.
Sol Yurick was an influence on Jonathan Lethem and one of the most radical voices of American literature. In 1954 Yurick was employed as a social investigator for New York’s department of welfare, which meant he met children who were part of street gangs yet no contemporary writer was documenting their lives and culture. Yurick began to observe the gangs, determined to describe them from the inside using their own language, and the result was The Warriors, one of the first novels to depict the urban experience of gang members (while basing the novel on the classical Greek writer Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’).
On the 4th of July, a hot summer’s night, 100,000 New York gang members gather in the Bronx as Cyrus, leader of the city’s most powerful gang, proposes that they form an invincible army. When Cyrus is killed, the Coney Island Dominators, the Family, are framed for his murder. Alone in enemy territory, over the course of the night, they are hunted by the police and every gang in the city.
Walter Hill’s movie sensationalised the novel, but now a new generation of readers (who will know the movie and DVD) have an opportunity to read Sol Yurick’s original, as well as Yurick’s exclusive afterword which details the inspiration behind the novel and the impact of the movie. This new edition of The Warriors will restore Yurick’s reputation as one of the most significant writers of the urban novel (along with his contemporary, Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn).
Sol Yurick was born in 1925, the son of Communist parents and grew up in New York. He also wrote Fertig (1966) and The Bag (1968), which, along with The Warriors, encapsulated the angry atmosphere of 1960’s New York. He died in 2013.
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