Flashback: Inside 'The Outsiders'
Posted by alli on 06-25-2008
Last night I re-read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton in one sitting and it gave me the chills. I remembered most of the dialog verbatim and revisiting those lines made me really nostalgic. I have read it so many times. I knew and loved each and every character and still feel like they are real people from my past — my childhood.
The iconic The Outsiders was written in 1967 by S. E. Hinton. She was 15 when she started writing it and 18 when it was published. The fact that it was written by a teen was compelling to young readers, but so was the fact that S.E. Hinton was female. I don't remember paying much attention to the author's gender when I read it as a teen, but I remember finding out Hinton wasn't a man later and being shocked. I assumed S.E. Hinton was a man. I'm not sure if I was simply surprised because Ponyboy's voice had seemed so convincing to me (Hinton maintains that he remains the most autobiographical of all of her characters), or because I couldn't believe publishers didn't trust that male readers would read a female author. Either way, I devoured it and so did all of my reader friends — girls and boys. And even though she's long been "outed" as a woman The Outsiders continues to be among the most loved and popular books for youth today.
I remember watching the Francis Ford Coppola movie from the 80's, too. I would sit in my basement-turned-tv-room and watch it over and over again on HBO while developing a new and different crush every time. It's possible that "The Outsiders" was my first "page-to-screen" experience. Sure, I had seen movies like "The Wizard of OZ," but they didn't count because I hadn't actually read the book. I liked the movie because of all the cute boys, but mostly I remember the dialog not quite passing muster. It was like something was lost in translation. In the book, the language was old-fashioned, but somehow it didn't seem to matter. It was still fresh. Still relevant. To be fair, the movie adaptation was very true to the book, but for whatever reason I felt like the actors were trying too hard, forcing something that had originally seemed so natural. That bothered me — immensely.
Even if some of the language is slightly dated (downright clean, by contemporary standards) I think readers respond to The Outsiders so viscerally because Ponyboy's voice is organic and his storytelling honest. S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders about similar events a friend had experienced in her hometown of Tulsa. I can't help but wonder if the ability to be so genuine came from simply being a teenager herself. I think a lot about how teens react to writing that is expressly for them but not by them, and this is a great example of a book that works because it is so authentic. Could it be that the best books for teens are by teens? No. But it's something to think about. What if teens were the only writers for teens? What would the YA landscape look like?
The Outsiders symbolized a transition in my reading from tween titles to books with heavier more mature content, characters, and dialog. Before S.E. Hinton, I had been reading the likes of the Anastasia Krupnik books by Lois Duncan, for example. They were great but offered nothing as riveting and as gritty as The Outsiders. Not only was I completely unaware of the level of violence some teens experienced, I hadn't really heard class discussed in a way that made any sense to me. I grew up in an affluent coastal town in Maine where class differences abounded but I never realized how I fit into the puzzle. I hadn't thought much about the reality of class even though I lived with it everyday. Oklahoma in the 60's was completely foreign to me but Ponyboy Curtis seemed to sum up his feelings about the issue in ways to which I related very personally. To me, he was a kindred spirit. He straddled two worlds; living among two classes yet never really feeling completely at home in either one.
Beyond socio-ecomomics, isn't "fitting-in" the bane of all teenage existence–the very definition of the universal adolescent experience? Ponyboy and his friends repeatedly articulate what it's like to feel trapped by circumstances–unable to move beyond something that's out of your control. That sense of powerlessness is something I think all teens feel at some time or another and one more reason Ponyboy and the story of his gang resonates with readers.
