The Warriors

by Sol Yurick

Book Overview

The basis for the cult-classic film The Warriors chronicles one New York City gang's nocturnal journey through the seedy, dangerous subways and city streets of the 1960s. Every gang in the city meets on a sweltering July 4 night in a Bronx park for a peace rally. The crowd of miscreants turns violent after a prominent gang leader is killed and chaos prevails over the attempt at order. The Warriors follows the Dominators making their...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802139922
• ISBN13: 9780802139924
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 181 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

the warriors

cool book quite different from the film..and as a fan wasnt expecting it.charachters in the book put a relatively new twist on my perception of it both film and book. good though.

great movie... more voilent than the movie

if youve seen the movie, youll probably have mixed feelings on this book. it is similar to the movie in some ways but also very different. the book is about a gang of kids that find themseves far away from thier home "turf". then have to fight thier way back across the city. the book is quite voilent as there is a pretty bad rape scene in it.

Belongs with Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies

This novel is actually quite good. In the beginning it feels a bit campy and maybe reads like an uninformed idyll. I couldn't imagine today's gangs coming together in a park and I have doubts as to whether or not street gangs of the sixties could even entertain the notion. I guess the mechanism used is a bit clumsy but it does get the story going and create the parrallels between a "modern" day street-gang and the isolated greek warriors of The Anabasis, which inspired this novel. Once we get away from the structure of the novel and into the moment to moment exchanges betweeen the characters and their environment, it all becomes rather real. There is something incredible about the way the story moves from covering the collective "group" perspective into filtering through and following the individual remnants that leaves both Catcher in the Rye (with its singular perspective) and Lord of the Flies (with its various group perspectives) feeling a little flat. By the time the main character, Hinton is strolling through the Times Square arcades, he is every bit as well realized as Mr. Caulfield and the environment is as vivid as any ever penned. Yurick like Salinger, knows his subject, and although at first glance some of the behavior may seem foreign and far-fetched, it is really a matter of being reminded of both how young these "Warriors" actually are, and like the Geek soldiers that they imitate, how the blood on their hands does little to diminish their actual innocene. It is really a process of realizing how fast we mature and the devastating effect of maturity on our imagination. I highly recommend the book but be warned, if your expecting the baseball furies to pop out at the park with bats-a-swinging, you may be a bit dissapointed, although shot on location in New York, Hollywood definitely has its influence. There are moments where the movie does appear to reflect the novel, and these moments only set you up for great surprises when the watered-down movie takes the easy way out, the novel trudges forward; bold and unashamed.

A must for fans of the film

Fans of the film will be shocked to learn that the Warriors were originally an all black gang. This is a must read, especially for the lengthy and informative introduction by the author.

"Can U dig it,... ?!!!"

Although much of the attention surrounding this novel comes from its film adaption, Walter Hill's stylized, surreal street gang epic, Sol Yurick's original novel is well worth a read, finally in print after decades!!! While Hill's film was very much an action adventure fest, this novel is a grim tale of how street gangs spawned in the extreme poverty in New York's worst neighborhoods, descriptions of housing project life, urban violence, this isn't a story of heroes and villains like the movie was. Based on Xenophon's Anabasis, this story follows a Coney Island street gang in its miles-long trek across the urban wasteland, just to make it home. A great novel, great movie...can u dig it?....