About the Author

Susan Eloise Hinton started writing The Outsiders when she was fifteen years old, a high school sophomore in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was fed up with the fiction being marketed to people her age. A friend of hers had been beaten up walking home from school for being a greaser, and the teen novels on the library shelves still seemed to think the most pressing adolescent problem was whether Susie would get asked to the prom. She kept rewriting the book through her junior year, finished it at sixteen, and Viking Press bought it. It came out in 1967, when Hinton was eighteen and a freshman at the University of Tulsa, having graduated the year before from Will Rogers High School — the same Tulsa school that supplied her greasers and Socs. The publisher worried that boys wouldn't pick up a gang novel written by a girl, so the book went out under the androgynous initials "S. E." Hinton, and most of the novel's early readers assumed the author was male.

Detailed Analysis

Hinton's authorial position is genuinely unusual in the American literary canon: she is not an adult writing retrospectively about adolescence, she is an adolescent writing about her own cohort in real time, and the voice of The Outsiders would be almost impossible to reverse-engineer from an older perspective. The small missteps that a grown writer would smooth out — the slightly worshipful descriptions of Sodapop, the solemn teenage earnestness about Paul Newman and sunsets — are precisely what make Ponyboy sound fourteen. Hinton would return to the same Tulsa imaginative geography in three later novels — That Was Then, This Is Now (1971), Rumble Fish (1975), and Tex (1979) — often recycling minor characters and Tulsa settings that drift from book to book the way kids in a real neighborhood do — Ponyboy himself makes a cameo in That Was Then, This Is Now. Taken together, the Tulsa cycle forms one of the most sustained portraits of working-class white adolescence in American fiction, and its emotional register — tender about boys, unsentimental about the forces that grind them down — is Hinton's signature. Her place in literary history rests less on prose style than on the door she opened: before her, the category "young adult" barely existed as a serious genre; after her, writers like Robert Cormier, Walter Dean Myers, and later Laurie Halse Anderson had a template for fiction that took teenagers' lives seriously as subject matter.

Historical Background

The Outsiders is set in 1965 Tulsa, though Hinton never names the city on the page — the geography is built out of East Side and West Side, drive-ins, vacant lots, and a freight line running out to a nowhere town called Windrixville. The cultural moment matters more than the map. Postwar America had produced an enormous and unprecedented middle class, and the teenagers of that class — the ones Hinton calls Socs — had time, cars, allowance money, and the leisure to treat cruelty as sport. The kids on the other side of town were the children of the workers who had not moved up: mechanics, dropouts, hospital orderlies, the brothers left behind after a parent died or disappeared. The greaser subculture Hinton documents — slicked-back hair, leather jackets, switchblades, a loose code of loyalty — was a real Midwestern phenomenon by the mid-1960s, already starting to look dated next to the hippies who would replace it on television a few years later. Hinton's own reading shows up in the book's intertextual scaffolding: Ponyboy and Johnny pass the days in the Windrixville church reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) aloud, and Ponyboy recites Robert Frost's 1923 poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" from memory — two texts that, between them, supply the novel's central image of doomed gallantry.

Detailed Analysis

What makes The Outsiders feel like a historical document as much as a novel is its attention to class stratification at a moment when mainstream American culture was loudly insisting class had been solved. The Kennedy and early Johnson years sold a story of shared postwar prosperity, and popular teen media — Gidget, beach movies, the squeaky-clean musicals — reflected that story back. Hinton's greasers are the counter-evidence: boys whose fathers drink, whose mothers have left, whose access to the middle-class story is blocked by a specific set of economic facts that nobody in the book has the vocabulary to name. Cherry Valance's famous line that "things are rough all over" gestures toward the novel's more sophisticated claim — that the Socs are miserable too — but the book does not pretend the two miseries are symmetrical. The Curtis brothers can be broken up by a social worker; the Sheldons cannot. The novel's reception has tracked its politics. On publication in 1967 it was reviewed favorably in the mainstream press and picked up quickly by teachers who noticed their reluctant readers would finish it in a weekend, but it has also been periodically challenged and pulled from school libraries over its language, its drinking, and the casual presence of weapons — most notably in the 1980s and 1990s, when it appeared on ALA lists of frequently banned books. Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film adaptation, made partly at the request of a California middle school librarian who wrote him a letter, locked the novel into American pop culture by casting a remarkable roster of future stars (Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez, Diane Lane) and introduced a new generation of readers to the book. Sixty years on, The Outsiders still turns up on middle-school reading lists every fall, and the class politics that its first reviewers sometimes treated as a quaint relic of the 1960s read, if anything, sharper now.