The Outsiders
The Outsiders
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S. E. Hinton on The Outsiders
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Fury at a curb, and a shelf full of useless booksThe book began not with an idea but with an assault. A friend of Hintonâs was attacked on his walk home by boys from the wealthier social set, the kind of boys who considered themselves above him, and the injustice of it sent her straight to the typewriter.
One day, a friend of mine was walking home from school and these âniceâ kids jumped out of a car and beat him up because they didnât like him being a greaser. This made me mad and I just went home and started pounding out a story about this boy who was beaten up while he was walking home from the movies â the beginning of The Outsiders.
Anger alone does not explain why the book took the shape it did. Running alongside the rage at a specific incident was a longer frustration: she looked at the fiction available to teenage readers and found it completely disconnected from any teenager she actually knew.
There was only a handful of books having teen-age protagonists: Mary Jane wants to go to the prom with the football hero and ends up with the boy next door and has a good time anyway. That didnât ring true to my life. I was surrounded by teens and I couldnât see anything going on in those books that had anything to do with real life.
The Outsiders was, among other things, an act of correction: she wrote the book she could not find on any shelf.
How she wrote it
Character first, plot by committeeHinton does not work from outline or theme. She works from feeling, and the feelings belong to a character she has already made vivid in her own mind before a single scene is drafted.
Itâs rare that a writer knows how they do anything (at least in my case). Since I am first of all a character writer, that characterâs emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion, after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel.
Writing Ponyboy Curtis, the fourteen-year-old greaser narrator of the novel, in a male voice was not a deliberate aesthetic strategy. It followed from who she was as a person long before she picked up a pen.
I was a tomboy when I was young; most of my friends were boys. I liked riding, hunting, playing football. I couldnât find anything to identify with in the female culture, which was pretty rigid at the time. I felt I thought like a boy. Writing from a male point of view always came easily for me; being a lazy person, I will usually take the easiest way.
Some of the most consequential plot turns in the novel were not hers alone. She workshopped the storyâs direction with the Tulsa teenagers around her, and they weighed in with specific ideas she then wrote into the book.
I asked my friends what should happen in the story, and they would say, âOh, the church should burn down.â
The burning church becomes one of the novelâs most wrenching sequences. It arrived not from a writerâs calculated plan but from a teenagerâs casual suggestion at the kitchen table.
The personal thread
The teenager nobody listened toHinton has spoken about why her empathy for overlooked kids did not come from her own home life but from a deliberate choice about whose company she kept. The distinction matters: she is not writing autobiography; she is writing from a loyalty she chose.
I understand kids and I really like them. And I have a very good memory. I remember exactly what it was like to be a teenager that nobody listened to or paid attention to or wanted around. I mean, it wasnât like that with my own family, but I knew a lot of kids like that and hung around with them.⌠Somehow I always understood them. They were my type.
The closeness between Hinton and her narrator Ponyboy goes beyond shared Tulsa zip codes. She has said that the things driving him through the novel are the things that drove her to write it.
the things that are important to him are the things that are important to me
What she wants us to sit with
Uniforms change; the groups do notHinton chose to write about adolescence because she saw it as the moment when a personâs ideals meet the worldâs resistance for the first time. She was living through that collision herself when she wrote the book, which is why the genreâs later softening of that collision has always struck her as dishonest.
I was a âyoung adultâ when I wrote The Outsiders, although it was not a genre at the time. Itâs an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality and you must compromise.
The near-total absence of adults in the novel was a craft choice that doubled as a thematic one. Keeping adults offstage was not sentimentality about youth; it was honesty about the limits of her own perspective at fifteen.
Like every other teen-ager, I was sure the adults had no idea what was going on. I didnât know how adults thought. I didnât âgetâ them, so it was easier for me to leave them out.
Decades of reader mail have confirmed what Hinton suspected from the beginning: the specific social geography of 1960s Tulsa, the greasers and the Socs, was never really the point. The point was something structural, and it has not moved.
I get the same letters from Outsiders readers as I did 40 years ago. And itâs selling as well today as it ever has. The kids still identify with the emotions, the social injustice. The uniforms change, the names change, but the groups go on forever.
She wrote the book at fifteen because she could not find one that told the truth about her world. Fifty-plus years on, teenagers are still finding it because it tells the truth about theirs.