{"id":3811,"date":"2013-01-08T06:30:01","date_gmt":"2013-01-08T13:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=3811"},"modified":"2013-01-10T06:39:11","modified_gmt":"2013-01-10T13:39:11","slug":"sol-yurick-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2013\/01\/08\/sol-yurick-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Sol Yurick Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Sol Yurick obituary<\/h1>\n

American novelist best known for The Warriors, a tale of gangs and street violence in New York<\/em><\/p>\n

by\u00a0Eric Homberger<\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Cast members of The Warriors, the film of Yurick’s novel, which became a cult classic. Photograph: Moviestore Collection\/Rex Features<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

The American novelist Sol Yurick, who has died aged 87, was too radical, too extreme and too violent for the respectable literary establishment of\u00a0New York<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The Warriors, a tale of\u00a0gangs<\/a>\u00a0and 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\u00a0Hubert Selby Jr<\/a>‘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.\u00a0Vincent Canby<\/a>\u00a0in the New York Times considered the film “a mish-mash of romantic cliches, moods and visual effects”.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Nike commercial<\/a>\u00a0and adapted as a PlayStation 2 game.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian<\/a> ]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian Sol Yurick obituary American novelist best known for The Warriors, a tale of gangs and street violence in New York by\u00a0Eric Homberger Cast members of The Warriors, the film of Yurick’s novel, which became a cult classic. Photograph: Moviestore Collection\/Rex Features The American novelist Sol Yurick, who has died aged 87, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}