‘The Outsiders’ by S. E. Hinton

The Outsiders (plural) by S. E. Hinton - not to be confused with The Outsider (single) by Albert Camus - has, in the forty or so years since it was published, become something of a classic in the field of young adult fiction. With more than eight million copies in print today, it is in fact the bestselling young adult novel of all time, and in 1983 it was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. The Outsiders is that rare literary beast, a book about young people written by a young person. A very young person, actually - Susan Eloise Hinton was just seventeen years old when she wrote The Outsiders and was in her freshman year of college when it was published, making the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (twenty-one when Less Than Zero was released) seem late bloomers by comparison. The Outsiders was an instant success, and though the teenagers for whom it was intended got there first, adult readers were quick to cotton on.

Whether the battle is between Sharks and Jets, Mods and Rockers, or Goths and Jocks, the idea of gang warfare is a wide-reaching one that we will all be familiar with, be it through art or through first-hand experience of our own. For the young S. E. Hinton, it was a case of art imitating life, as The Outsiders was written with a real-life gang war in mind. She was troubled by the clashes between two gangs at her high school, the Greasers (the clue is in the name) and the rich-kid Socs, and chose to write The Outsiders from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old Greaser named Ponyboy Curtis. The characteristics of the two rival gangs are much less important than the more general notion of us and them. In this case, us refers to the Greasers while them refers to the Socs. As Jodi Picoult explains in her introduction to this Penguin Modern Classics edition: ‘…although in high school today you may not find Greasers or Socs, you will easily be able to pick out jocks and brains, heads and Goths and art freaks and drama groupies. The division between popular and unpopular still exists; all that’s changed are the labels and salient characteristics.’ One day the long-fought battle between Greasers and Socs comes to a fatal head, and Ponyboy is forced to reconsider everything he thinks he knows.

Set in S. E. Hinton’s own hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Outsiders is an audacious yet visceral tale of teenage rebellion and alienation. Not only is Ponyboy Curtis exquisitely named, he is also a likeable if somewhat damaged main character, your quintessential hoodlum-with-a-heart. He is an orphan being brought up by his oldest brother Darry while his middle brother - the handsome and also brilliantly named Sodapop, or Soda for short - parades around town with a succession of girls. While the French, for example, were already well acquainted with the anti-hero by 1967, the United States was not, and The Outsiders ushered in a brave new kind of character: a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who smokes like a chimney but also has a penchant for quoting Robert Frost and going to the movies alone. Furthermore, in terms of style, The Outsiders is told in a taut but pared-down hand that belies the author’s very young age.

Finally, if you own this particular edition of The Outsiders, be sure not to skip Jodi Picoult’s wonderful introduction.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in February 2013.