Everything you need to understand or teach Rumble and Memos from Purgatory by Harlan Ellison.
Ellison's first novel Rumble is a violent revenge fantasy based on material he gathered after joining a Brooklyn street gang in the late 1950s. As an evocation of the brutality and excitement of street-life, the novel succeeds fairly well, and the protagonist, Rusty Santoro, is a reasonably credible, if one-dimensional, character. However, intense although it is, Rumble lacks insight into the psychology of its characters, and, therefore, their victimization...