Includes bibliographical references and index.

Outlaw gangs in an outlaw society : Jorge Luis Borges's "The dread redeemer Lazarus Morell" (1972) and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) -- The Irish immigrant : Herbert Asbury's The gangs of New York (1927) -- The draft riots : Kevin Baker's Paradise Alley (2002) -- New York gangs around the turn of the twentieth century : Jorge Luis Borges's "Monk Eastman, purveyor of iniquities" (1972) -- A heritage of guns : Larry McMurtry's Anything for Billy (1998) -- The 1920s in Chicago : James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (1932) -- Jewish gangs in Brownsville, 1944-1945 : Irving Shulman's The Amboy dukes (1946) -- 1940s in Harlem : Richard Wright's Rite of passage (1978) -- Nazis and gangs : William Golding's Lord of the flies (1954) -- A girl gang in the 1950s : Joyce Carol Oate's Foxfire (1993) -- Gangs in the1960s : S.E. Hinton's The outsiders (1967) -- Vietnam and civil rights : Pat Conroy's The lords of discipline (1980) -- Prep schools and Watergate : Robert Cormier's The chocolate war (1974) -- Family disintegration in the 1980s : Walter Dean Myers's Scorpions (1988) -- 1960s Los Angeles : Frank Bonham's Durango Street (1965) -- South Central Los Angeles : Kody Scott's Monster (1993) -- Barrio gangs of the 1960s and 1970s : Luis Rodriguez's Always running, La vida loca : gang days in L.A. (1993) -- Filipino Americans : Brian Ascalon Roley's American son (2001) -- Vietnamese gangs and skinheads : Sherry Garland's Shadow of the dragon (1993) -- Chinese gangs : Dan Mahoney's : The two Chinatowns (2001).