Hinton, S. E. (2006). The outsiders. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN 0-14-240733-X. Originally published in 1967.
Why read this book
Read the book that started the modern young-adult literature boom and has sold more copies than any other young-adult novel. Meet Ponyboy Curtis, the likeable 14-year-old who tells his story, and see what life looks like to a group of teenage “greasers” who are discriminated against mostly because they are poor.
Plot summary
Ponyboy, the 14-year-old narrator of The Outsiders, is a greaser, which in his small city on the southern plains means he’s poor and wears his hair longer than the rich, preppy “Socs” who have the upper hand in Ponyboy’s world. Since the death of his parents in a car wreck eight months earlier, Ponyboy lives with his 16-year-old brother Sodapop and his 20-year-old brother Darry. Their social circle is a tight group of other “greasers,” guys who aren’t afraid to shoplift and get into fights with the Socs, but who are basically decent people, especially in the ways that they take care of each other.
One Saturday night Ponytail and his friends Johnny and Two-Bit have a chance encounter with a couple of Soc girls at a drive-in that gets Ponytail thinking that maybe there’s more to some Socs than he had thought. But later that night the Soc girls’ boyfriends jump Johnny and Ponytail, and one of the Socs ends up dead. Johnny and Ponytail flee town on a freight train and hide out in an old church in the countryside. They manage to return home before too long, but before the dust settles from the Soc’s death, Ponyboy has suffered other losses and is on the brink of losing his mind. Ultimately he manages to turn the unfairness he feels as a greaser into productive resistance to the conditions of his life.
Critical evaluation
This has to be the most brilliant novel ever written by a 16-year-old. For all adult readers of young-adult literature, most of which is written by adults, questions of authenticity linger in the back of the mind. “How well did they get this? Are these voices believable? Do young people really talk like this and see the world this way?” With The Outsiders, this question is suspended and transformed. S. E. Hinton wrote the book when she was 16 years old, so it’s got to be authentic. The question becomes, how did a 16-year-old express herself so well?
Hinton’s prose is spirited and straightforward and her characters are engaging and believable. The novelty of her plotting is the only hint I saw of her youth, but it is a hint of freshness and originally rather than of naïveté. Rather than a predictable sequence of scene setting, suspense building, and climax, Hinton structures the plot around a series of events that resolve themselves prematurely. Ponyboy, Johnny and Two-Bit transgress boundaries by hanging out with Cherry and Marcia at the drive-in, but there’s no scene before they part ways. The consequence is delayed to the point that Johnny’s killing of Bob and his escape with Ponyboy become a new dramatic arc rather than a resolution of the tension at the drive-in. The fire in the church and Johnny’s and Ponyboy’s heroism resolve the threat of their being arrested for murder when the novel is only half-way finished, a distinct contrast to the on-going suspense of a novel like Richard Wright’s Native Son. Even the rumble in the park and the death of Johnny and Dally are not the true climax of the novel. The novel climaxes not with events, but with resolution of the theme of fairness. In a self-referential moment that portends post-modernism, the climax of the novel is Ponyboy’s decision to resist the unfairness he sees in life by writing the novel we are reading.
About the author
S. E. Hinton was born in 1950 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she has continued to live all her life. She began The Outsiders, her remarkable first novel, as a short story when she was 15 years old in response to a friend being beat up on the way home from a movie. She turned the short story into a novel when she was 16, and it was published when she was 17. From the beginning, The Outsiders was well received by both young readers and critics and it “remains the best-selling young-adult novel of all time” (Peck, 2007).
Hinton based the conflict between Socs and greasers on her own high school experiences and, like Ponyboy, she saw writing the novel as a way to address the injustices she saw (biography.jrank.org, n.d.). Hinton continued to write well-received young-adult novels, including That Was Then, This Is Now (1971), Rumble Fish (1975), Tex (1979), and Taming the Star Runner (1988). During the 1980s she collaborated in the creation of films based on several of her novels, including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983) and Christopher Cain's That Was Then, This Is Now (1985). Tim Hunter directed a film based on Tex (1982).
Genre: The Outsiders a seminal work in Diana Tixier Herald’s “Life is Hard: Outsiders” category of young-adult literature, but it also fits well in her “Contemporary Life: Coming of Age” category.
Curriculum ties
Joanne S. Gillespie provides a thoughtful and thorough array of ideas for working with The Outsiders in high school English classes (Gillespie, 2006). The 2006 edition of The Outsiders
The Outsiders is a thoroughly white book with no references to race or ethnicity (and with the “gallant” Southern gentlemen from Gone with the Wind as a substantial point of reference). For classes with a diversity of students, The Outsiders might still be effective. By its exploration of social conflict from a class perspective, it may provide a neutral window into race- and ethnic-based differences.
Book-talking ideas
· Read from Ponyboy’s engaging early descriptions of his friends.
· Highlight the themes of fairness and “staying gold.”
· Show a clip from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film that conveys the Soc-greaser rivalry; point out all the young actors in the film whose names might be familiar to today’s adolescents.
Reading level/interest age
Most middle school and high school libraries in the San Francisco Unified School District include multiple copies of The Outsiders. At least three middle school libraries have class sets of the novel, which probably indicates that it is read in English/language arts classes.
Challenge issues
The Outsiders includes minimal swearing and no sex, but the violence and underage cigarette smoking may be of concern to some adults.
Responses
· Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”
· Point out that the violence is not gratuitous and that central characters in the novel question both the violence and the smoking.
· Inform the challenger that the book continues to be highly regarded young-adult literature, as evidenced in Dale Peck’s 2007 review in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/review/Peck-t.html?scp=3&sq=dale%20peck&st=cse)
· Direct the challenger to a list of awards the book has received (http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1604/Hinton-S-usan-E-loise-1950.html).
Why I chose to read this book
Although I saw the film The Outsiders many years ago, I had never read the novel. Given its seminal role in the development of young-adult literature, it was on my must-read list.
References
biography.jrank.org (n.d.). S(usan) E(loise) Hinton. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1604/Hinton-S-usan-E-loise-1950.html
Gillespie, J. S. (2006, January). Getting inside S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. English Journal 95(3), 44-48. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://libaccess.sjlibrary.org/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/pqdweb?did=975470931&sid=3&Fmt=4&clientId=17867&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Peck, D. (2007, September 23). The Outsiders: 40 years later. The New York Times. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/review/Peck-t.html?scp=3&sq=dale%20peck&st=cse
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