Like The Deadly Streets, Ellison's first short story collection published under the same imprint three years earlier, this book brings together a number of the author's early juvenile-gang fiction.
Readers of this portion of the Ellison canon will recognize several characters and stories in Children of the Streets. Rusty Santoro, protagonist of Ellison's first novel, Web of the City, makes an appearance, as does Stag Preston, the rock-and-roll anti-hero of Spider Kiss. The book's original introduction, "Ten Weeks in Hell," is an abbreviated version of Ellison's time in a street gang, later recounted in grisly and fascinating detail in Memos from Purgatory. But none of these primordial efforts quite succeeds; at this point, Ellison was long on narrative velocity, short on thematic depth. The most successful story in the collection, "Memory of the Muted Trumpet," exhibits at least a hint of the complexity that will come to characterize Ellison's best work.
An updated version of the book was announced in the mid-1970s as part of Pyramid's line of Ellison reissues, but the series was suspended before the book could be published. Finally, in late 2004 -- 43 years after its first appearance -- Children of the Streets finally appeared under its original title.
