author

Joseph Adams Puffer

b. 1872

Best known for The Boy and His Gang, he explored boys’ social worlds with an early mix of observation, interviews, and reform-minded curiosity. His writing looks at youth behavior not as a simple moral failure, but as something shaped by friendship, belonging, and environment.

1 Audiobook

The Boy and His Gang

The Boy and His Gang

by Joseph Adams Puffer

About the author

Joseph Adams Puffer was an American writer remembered chiefly for The Boy and His Gang, published in 1912. The book draws on accounts from sixty-six boys and examines gang life, play, loyalty, and juvenile behavior in a way that now reads as an early social study as much as a work of popular nonfiction.

Available sources consistently identify him as born on February 13, 1872, and they connect his reputation most strongly to writing about boys, youth culture, and delinquency. Because reliable biographical information is fairly sparse in the sources I could confirm here, it seems safest to view him as a little-known but notable early observer of childhood social life rather than to overstate details about his career.

Readers coming to Puffer today will likely find him interesting less for literary style than for the window he offers into early twentieth-century ideas about adolescence, peer groups, and social reform.