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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/07/sol-yurick
Sol Yurick obituary
American novelist best known for The Warriors, a tale of gangs and
street violence in New York
Eric Homberger
The Guardian, Monday 7 January 2013 11.36 EST
The American novelist Sol Yurick, who has died aged 87, 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. His novels The Warriors (1965), Fertig (1966) and
The Bag (1968) constitute a trilogy of vibrant energy, biting satire and
high, though irreverent, artistic seriousness.
The Warriors, a tale of gangs and street violence, was rejected by 27
publishers before it finally appeared. With its carefully crafted
parallels with Xenophon's Anabasis, it was more literary than Hubert
Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), but shared its gritty feel for
the city's underclass. In 1979 it was made into a stylish film by Walter
Hill. Vincent Canby in the New York Times considered the film "a
mish-mash of romantic cliches, moods and visual effects".
Yurick, who thought it trashy and sentimentalised, agreed. After the New
York premiere, his daughter, Susanna, said: "It's all right, daddy, the
kids will love it." And they did. The Warriors became a cult classic,
later embraced by hip-hop acts including the Wu-Tang Clan, spoofed in a
Nike commercial and adapted as a PlayStation 2 game.
Hill's movie drew upon comic-book characterisation but Yurick, who came
out of the proletarian belly of New York, knew better. His parents, Sam
and Flo, immigrants from eastern Europe, were communists and trade-union
activists. Marx and Lenin, strikes and demonstrations, were regular
topics of dinner-table conversation. His earliest political memory was,
at the age of 14, the anguish he felt at the Stalin-Hitler pact. Yurick
enlisted in the US army in 1944 and trained as a surgical technician. A
long illness led to a medical discharge in 1945. The GI bill enabled him
to attend New York University, where he studied literature. He read
James Joyce with intensity and conceived (half-seriously) the Joycean
idea of using the Anabasis of Xenophon as a way to tell the story of a
gang battling through the city towards their home at Coney Island.
He went to work as a social investigator in the department of welfare in
1954. Life within the welfare bureaucracy led Yurick to conclude that
such programmes were designed solely to control the poor. He later wrote
an angry essay on welfare which he submitted to Commentary, a leading
Jewish magazine with intellectual pretensions. It was repeatedly
rejected by the editor, Norman Podhoretz. Yurick had committed the
unforgivable sin of writing with too much passion, of violating the
canons of civility and detachment. He was sure that the rejection was
political.
Despite the critical success of Elia Kazan's harsh film On the
Waterfront and the romantic ethnic ghettos of West Side Story, Yurick
felt that writers were ignoring the city's streets. He wanted to bring
night-time New York, after the shoppers and men in grey-flannel suits
went home to the suburbs, back to the centre of culture. While working
with poor families, he encountered children who were members of street
gangs. He found it impossible to talk to them directly about gang life;
they would tell him only what they believed he wanted to hear. A rented
panel truck gave him a way to observe them secretly. He walked the
streets where the gangs ruled, and once went on foot through the subway
tunnel between 96th Street and 110th Street. It was a scary experience.
He wanted to show that street gangs, universally seen as a symptom of
social dysfunctionality, gave to the poor a structure of loyalty and a
sense of community. They were neither sick, nor bad, only poor.
Fertig, Yurick's second novel, was a scathing commentary on the American
healthcare and legal system. He spent several years doing research for
the book in Kings County and Bellevue hospitals in New York, taking
mental notes, as he tried to figure out the way a grieving father might
take revenge upon those whose indifference led to the death of his son.
Fertig was made into the film The Confession (1999), featuring Alec
Baldwin and Ben Kingsley. Its feelgood ending was false to the spirit of
the novel.
From the mid-1960s Yurick became increasingly involved in street
protests against the war in Vietnam. As the protests accelerated into
free speech confrontations with "liberal" educational establishments
such as Columbia University, he worked with Students for a Democratic
Society, contributing to the SDS tract Who Runs Columbia? and sharpening
their strategy. Yurick's wife, the potter Adrienne Lash, was a close
associate of Ted Gold, an SDS leader who was a key figure in the radical
Weather Underground organisation. Gold was one of three bombmakers
killed in an explosion at 18 West 11th Street in 1970. The survivors of
the explosion went into hiding. The FBI was all over the cell, and the
documentation later released under the Freedom of Information Act
(available with redaction on the FBI website) patiently builds a
chilling portrait of the city's middle-class terrorists in the 1960s.
Yurick's third novel, The Bag, was soaked in the violence-fuelled spirit
of that terrible year, with its mix of racism, sex, revolution, police
repression and Molotov cocktails. Truman Capote thought it was the worst
novel of the year. Two further novels followed, and a collection of
short stories, Someone Just Like You (1973), but the rapid
disintegration of the student protest movement that decade left Yurick
to confront the prospect of being a novelist and not the mentor of a
revolution.
He edited an anthology of previously unpublished Brooklyn writers in
1973, using material submitted in an open (and unpaid) competition
organised by the public library. He worked with Bertell Ollmann on an
alternative socialist boardgame to Monopoly, and began work on a Marxist
detective story hopefully aiming to reveal the innocence of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, who were found guilty of spying in 1951.
Books were announced and never published. Film projects – including a
remake of The Warriors by Tony Scott – were abandoned. Several of his
books were marked "offsite" in the New York public library catalogue. It
was a kind of cultural death.
He published Behold Metatron in 1985, collecting complex and verbose
essays on the emerging "Metastate". Yurick was an occasional reviewer
and signer of public letters protesting against one enormity after
another. In 1987 he took an office job in Brooklyn. A venturesome
publisher is needed to reissue Yurick's complete 60s trilogy; like Selby
and the New York novelist Daniel Fuchs, he saw American cities with a
ferocious clarity.
He is survived by Adrienne, Susanna and a grandson.
• Sol Yurick, novelist, born 18 January 1925; died 5 January 2013
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