“What I remember affecting me most was that it was entertaining without trying to be entertaining,” Greene says. Nick Greene, editor-at-large for Mental Floss was similarly impressed by Hinton’s tell-it-like-it-is approach. “That’s a book that showed me it could be done.” “I’d like to go deeper next time,” Benincasa notes. “What has stuck with me is the sadness… The Outsiders is one of those books that made people believe juvenile fiction, or what the publishing industry eventually rebranded as ‘young adult’ fiction, could go beyond dating and cutesy shit to address real issues with depth and nuance.” For Benincasa, Hinton’s work proved that teens are up for being challenged with writing about big issues, ones to do with gender, sexuality, and violence. “I read The Outsiders when I was around 11 years old,” says Sara Benincasa, writer, comedian and author of the young adult book Great. Though the specific social mores of The Outsiders are dated, that freshness remains, and continues to inspire writers.
Just go to a restaurant instead.’ Who is right in that conversation?” And you are just like ‘You are never going to do that. “They just want to wipe out racism, for example. “Teenagers have that kind of freshness to the world,” Lonergan said in a recent New Yorker profile. Unfortunately, you can see what it is, too.” It’s the same dynamic that drives filmmakers like Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan to unpack the world of high school students. “The teenage years are a bad time,” Hinton wrote in her op-ed. The differences between the Greasers and the Socs have to do with money, but behind them, Ponyboy realizes, they aren’t so different, if only they could figure that out.
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The Outsiders captured, as if in amber, the ongoing fight at the heart of the adolescent experience – knowing that the way things stand is wrong, but being unclear how to fix it, and frustrated with older adults for continuing on, obliviously. Though the era of Socs and Greasers has long past, the adolescent dynamic Hinton picked up on remains, even though the name of the groups changes. It’s the title of an entire album by Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit and a song by Run the Jewels. For proof, just look at the long tail of the phrase “Stay gold, Ponyboy.” In The Outsiders, those are the dying words of Greaser Johnny Cade, itself a half-remembered quote from the Robert Frost poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” In 2017, “Stay Gold” is a phrase you can find emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to throw pillows. More than that: despite its age, The Outsiders continues to be a touchstone for adults who were born long after Hinton’s graduation from high school.
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Fifty years later, the book has sold upwards of 15 million copies, become a steady feature on middle school reading lists, inspired a Francis Ford Coppola film of the same name and helped shape an entire literary genre marketed to young adults.īlack Sabbath on the Making of 'Vol. But it was a hit with teenagers across the country. Hinton’s novel, which describes in gritty detail the ongoing gang warfare between the lower-class Greasers and the well-to-do Socials, didn’t have much to do with romance or horses, unless you count her protagonist, the 14-year-old Greaser Ponyboy Curtis. “In the fiction they write, romance is still the most popular theme, with a horse-and-the-girl-who-loved-it coming in a close second.”
“The authors of books for teen-agers are still 15 years behind the times,” she wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Most of the literature handed down for high school students to read had, in Hinton’s estimation, nothing to do with the lived experiences of teenagers in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton published The Outsiders in 1967, a novel she began writing at age 15 and sold at 17, the idea of a teenager writing fiction for her peers was a novelty.
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