Reprints and publications at other publishers followed, such as: Richie Gennaro is the 17-year-old leader of the Wanderers, an Italian-American youth gang in the Bronx in 1962.

Richie's friends in the Wanderers are Joey Capra, Buddy Borsalino, Eugene Caputo and Perry LaGuardia.

[7] Kirkus Reviews called the book "a fine first novel — gritty, incisive, unpatronizing, authentic in its detail, able to recreate a dead era and deal with the American male myth (city-style) while somehow managing miraculously to avoid both pomposity and sentimentality.

"[8] New York called it "a powerhouse," writing that "the book is raunchy, violent, tender, cruel, and laugh-your-ass-off funny.

The first Avon Books printing from February 1975 refers to the upcoming movie ("SOON A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE").

[10] The artwork of the title on the front cover of the same book may have been the inspiration for the 'Wanderers logo' on the back of the uniform jackets in the film.

However disappointed with all their boys lifestyles, Richie sees her "disappear" and becoming more interested and heading into a higher spiritual road along the intellectual Youth Force that will lead the 1960s away from the 1950s in which his gang were still lingering, and way ahead incomprehensible for him at the verge of settling into a married man life.

Witnessing the assassination of President Kennedy on a store-window TV set made him realize that change was spinning and speeding up in the nation as a whole, as well as in him and his peers as they transitioned from teens to young adults.