An essay Dale Peck wrote for the Times in does a great job of delineating all those influences. Many of the books and stories that Hinton mentions were originally written for adults but have since become favorites among teen-age readers. I read mostly nonfiction, as a matter of fact. I am all for it. By Jon Michaud. More: Francis Ford Coppola. F ifty years ago this spring, the best selling young adult novel of all time was published to adulation and outrage. The aura surrounding the classic tale of warring adolescent cliques from opposite sides of the tracks is enhanced by the fact that the author was herself a teenager.
We are not, by the way, talking about some urbane year-old groomed for the elite cultural circles of Manhattan. Hinton was an Oklahoma high school student when she completed the manuscript she was then calling A Different Sunset. The Outsiders —which still sells half a million copies every year—forever changed the way books are written for young readers.
In the case of Hinton, this decision was encouraged by Velma Varner, her editor at Viking, who believed that using her given name S. So was Hinton a s Wendy, looking after some Peter Pan in a leather jacket? The climactic rumble with the Socs could take place on any vacant lot in any city. Yet the relationships between the members of their gang — the misinterpreted protectiveness of Darry to Pony, the fatal devotion of Dallas to Johnny, the simpatico of Soda and Steve — are intricate enough to justify a map.
Her characters, by contrast, embody and implicitly understand the contradictory wages of group identity, its sorrowful stain and addictive comforts. The one thing we were proud of. He is not a fighter; yet rumbling is who his brothers are, and, thus, who he is. A voracious reader who believed from a young age she'd become a writer, she noticed that books with teen protagonists were quite limited and did not encounter real-life situations.
She imagined writing a book about kids that they would want to read with characters that were true-to-life and facing more realistic, more challenging situations. In , she started writing a book that did seem to portray teenagers with veracity although her novels were rife with violence and evasion. Her first book, The Outsiders published , was based on two rival gangs at her high school , Will Rogers High School, and she began writing it after a classmate was beaten up by the rich kids as he walked home.
Her inspiration came not only from her experience in high school, but also from the novels that she read, including Gone With the Wind , and Great Expectations , and the stories of Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury. Hinton received her contract from the publisher of The Outsiders the day she graduated from high school.
With C. Thomas Howell, who played Ponyboy. Source: Tulsa World. By , her freshman year in college, she was a published writer, and The Outsiders would eventually sell more than 14 million copies. Prior to publication, her publisher suggested that she use her initials rather than her given name, to ensure that if a male reviewer were to read the book, they would not discount it based on her gender. It was, after all, a first person narrative.
The Outsiders was written from the perspective of Ponyboy, a Greaser the working class street kids. The Greasers are in conflict with the Socs Socials , who are the privileged upper-class kids. The conflict escalates until Ponyboy faces a situation which changes his life.
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