Sol Yurick

Sol Yurick was an American novelist. He was known for his book The Warriors which became a major motion picture.

Yurick was born on January 18, 1925 to a Russian Jewish immigrant father Sam, a miller, and his mother Flo, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant. Theirs was a Jewish working-class family and politically active, both for communism and in the labor movement as trade-union activists. Family life in his early years meant that "Marx and Lenin, strikes and demonstrations, were regular topics of dinner-table conversation", according to Eric Homberger of The Guardian, and that "his earliest political memory was, at the age of 14, the anguish he felt at the Stalin-Hitler pact." The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was an agreement between Stalin and Hitler that was made in the last few weeks before the outbreak of war, leading Yurick to both fall out with his father, and to enlist in 1944 during World War II – where he trained as an Army surgical technician. Yurick said, "My feelings as a Jew were more important than my feelings as a communist."

After the war he took a bachelor's degree at New York University, majoring in literature. He graduated and took a job with New York City's welfare department as a social investigator, a job he held until the early 1960s. It was here that he became familiar with children of welfare families, many of whom were "then called juvenile delinquents [...] Many of them belonged to fighting gangs...numbered in the hundreds; they were veritable armies." He earned his master's in English from Brooklyn College soon after, and then took up writing full-time.

Yurick was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement at this time. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1972, Yurick was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

• Ancestry.com. U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.
  • Name: Sol Yurick; Race: White; Age: 18; Birth Date: 18 Jan 1925; Birth Place: Manhattan, New York City; Registration Date: 18 Jan 1943; Registration Place: Bronx, New York; Employer: Student; Height: 6': Weight: 150 pounds; Complexion: Light; Hair Color: Brown; Eye Color: Brown; Next of Kin: Florence Yurick (mother).
• Fuegi, John. "Yurick, Sol." Encyclopedia.com. < link > Accessed 2 January 2023.
• "Sol Yurick." Wikipedia, revision of 13 December 2023. < link > Accessed 2 January 2023.
• Yardley, William. "Sol Yurick, 87, Author of 'The Warriors' Gang Novel." The New York Times, published 9 January 2013. < link > Accessed 2 January 2023.