🇺🇸S.E.
Hinton

She was fifteen years old and furious. Not at anything in particular — at everything in general: the rigid social hierarchies of Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the way boys from the wrong neighborhood were treated as disposable; the fact that the books assigned in class had nothing to do with the lives she saw around her. Susan Eloise Hinton sat down to write The Outsiders in 1963, not as an act of ambition, but as an act of necessity. The books she wanted to read did not exist. She would write one herself.

The Outsiders is the story of Ponyboy Curtis, a fourteen-year-old "greaser" from the working-class east side of Tulsa, caught between his own gang and the wealthy "Socs" — short for Socials — from the west side. It is a story about loyalty and violence and the cruelty of class, written with the authenticity that only a teenager could bring to it. Hinton had seen the social divisions she described. She had friends on both sides. The characters were drawn from people she knew. The emotion was real. The detail was exact. When her English teacher read the first draft, she told Hinton to keep writing. Hinton did.

She revised the book through her sophomore and junior years, guided partly by the advice of her English teacher and partly by her own instincts about what the story needed. Her father fell seriously ill during this period — a fact that, in interviews, she has cited as a reason for the book's sustained emotional weight. She was writing from grief as well as anger. The manuscript she completed was not the work of a precocious child playing at being a novelist. It was a serious novel written by a teenager who had been paying close attention to the world.

Her mother submitted the manuscript to Viking Press. Viking published it in 1967, the year Hinton turned seventeen. The publisher recommended she use her initials rather than her full name — Susan Eloise — because the prevailing wisdom held that boys, the assumed primary audience for this kind of story, would not read a book they knew was written by a woman. S.E. Hinton. Two letters and a surname that revealed nothing about gender. She accepted the condition. The irony is that The Outsiders was eventually read by more girls than boys, and became one of the first novels to treat teenage female readers as sophisticated enough to engage with male-perspective stories about class, violence, and brotherhood.

The book was an immediate critical and commercial success. It was adopted into high school curricula across the United States. It never went out of print. It sold steadily for decades — sixteen million copies and counting. Francis Ford Coppola adapted it into a film in 1983, casting a generation of young Hollywood talent including Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Ralph Macchio. A television series followed. The novel is still assigned in American middle and high schools at a rate that makes it one of the most-read books in the country.

Hinton followed The Outsiders with That Was Then, This Is Now (1971), Rumble Fish (1975), and Tex (1979) — a body of work that established her as the defining voice of a literary genre that did not yet have a name when she began writing. Young Adult fiction, as a publishing category, was effectively invented in response to what she and a handful of contemporary authors demonstrated was possible: literature written for teenagers, from the perspective of teenagers, engaging honestly with the violence, class anxiety, identity confusion, and emotional intensity of adolescent experience. She was the first. She was seventeen years old when the first book appeared. She was writing it at fifteen.