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.
Praise for Sol Yurick and The Warriors:
“Rage is the fuel that makes Sol Yurick’s fiction burn.”—New York Times
“[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 1960s.”—The Guardian
“It seems to me the best novel of its kind I’ve ever read, an altogether
perfect achievement. I’m sure that to many it will sound like sacrilege but
I have to say that I think it a better novel than Lord of the Flies.”—
Warren Miller, author of The Cool World
“Written powerfully enough to make you succumb to the distorted reality and
values of these groups as you follow ‘the family’ on a brutal odyssey back
to Coney Island . . . Raw, intense and perversely readable.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The Warriors goes to the core of the heart of darkness.”—Flyer
