The Amboy Dukes (novel)

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). 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.

The Amboy Dukes was considered somewhat outré, unsavory, and shocking for its time, 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. It was sometimes banned from schools.