The Amboy Dukes (novel)

Cover of the 1947 first edition, the subtitle being "A novel of youth and crime in Brooklyn"

The Amboy Dukes is a 1947 novel by Irving Shulman, his first.

The novel concerns the misadventures of a 1940s Jewish street gang of young toughs based on Amboy Street in the working class Brownsville section of Brooklyn (Brownsville, from its founding into the 1950s, was a primarily Jewish neighborhood).[1] The gang, characters, and most of the story are fictional, but a key event of the novel – the murder of a high school teacher by two gang members – was based on an actual case.[2]

The Amboy Dukes was considered somewhat outré, unsavory, and shocking for its time,[citation needed] as it depicts its teenage juvenile delinquent protagonists fighting, smoking marijuana reefers, cutting class, using foul language, carrying homemade zip guns, having sex, abusing girls, and being generally vicious.[3] It was sometimes banned from schools.[citation needed]

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