The Outsiders

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman — he looks tough and I don’t — but I guess my own looks aren’t so bad. I have light brown, almost red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have. My hair is longer than a lot of boys wear theirs, squared off in back and long at the front and sides, but I am a greaser and most of my neighborhood rarely bothers to get a haircut. Besides, I look better with long hair.”

I saw on Twitter this morning that it was the 40th anniversary of the movie adaptation of the 1967 book by S.E. Hinton: The Outsiders. I’d read the book about 1972 and several more times after that over the years. It was required reading for contemporary literature back then. The hip/youth oriented teenage angst book. Gangs, teenagers struggling “to find themselves“. It was well written. Timeless. Something most of us didn’t know back then was that it was written by a 17-yr-old girl. You can kind of see it now in the opening paragraph above where she says, “My hair is longer than a lot of boys wear theirs…”. A guy never would have said that. I had always assumed from the street gang angle that it was set in NYC or Chicago, but it’s Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Susan Eloise Hinton (picture below) was 16 when she wrote it. They say in the paragraph that it was published in her freshman year of college. What a time that was. It sounds like she was unprepared for the fame and fortune. She had a real bad case of writers block for several years. She finally got past it and wrote: That Was Then, This Is Now (1971). It was was just creepy. In The Outsiders written in the mid-60’s the drug of choice was alcohol. Whiskey and beer. In her second book it reflected the changing time of 1971 for sure, but it was hard drugs then. LSD, heroin, uppers, downers, not good stuff. And it was not uplifting either. A real downer. There was a little cross-pollination with a character or two from the original book, which was fun.

Her third book: Rumble Fish (1975), I don’t think I got past the first couple of chapters. It was that depressing. Seeing as Susan was on the “college track”, I don’t know how she captured so well the poor/essentially criminal class she wrote about. I “know” the type of people she wrote about, people who were on the absolute very last rung of the economic ladder that could be considered ‘working class’. In Iowa in would be the area just to the west of the Iowa State Fairgrounds. The best of people, the worst of people.

But back to The Outsiders. I see the author was born July 22, 1948. If she wrote it when she was sixteen it would have been over the 1964/1965 time frame. Its hard to describe to someone who didn’t live back then, but 1964 America was not the same country as 1970 America when she wrote her second book. It just wasn’t. It was smack in the middle of a “social revolution” in 1970. America was experiencing very painful upheaval. Kind of like the ‘happy sunny‘ opening of Midnight Cowboy, versus the dark repulsive middle end when his life had self destructed.

She was an early “baby boomer”, I was a late baby boomer. She was at the vanguard of that huge population bubble, America was booming and the workplace was hungry for young people. Our economy hadn’t been decimated like it would be in the latter part of the 70’s when I came along. She was part of old America, full of optimism and opportunities. I was part of stagflation and Arab oil embargoes. The loss in Vietnam. The Carter years. My group didn’t have sexual liberation we had Aids in the early 80’s. I was old enough to have seen what I missed.

Susan’s later books dealing with families destroyed by drugs I can relate to. I didn’t understand it at the time. 50 years ago. The trailer parks, cheap apartments, the gaunt faces, the stagnation of their lives. The odd hours they kept, their suspicious nature towards strangers. Rust bucket 15 year old Impalas. Drugs does that. Alcohol. Because in Outsiders the ‘battle’ was between the rich kids (Socs/socials) and the poor kids (the greasers – hair grease). And basically what seperates rich from poor is substance abuse. You either have it or you don’t. That’s what she covers.

The “war on drugs” would be fought in earnest over the next 30 years. The various incarnations of “just say no”. She dives off at various places into politics and left/right, but really I see it as much more basic. Because its pretty hard in this country not to advance, even in the most mediocre job if you keep your nose clean and work hard. I suppose what she covers so well is what its like trying to come out of the environment, when you weren’t born on “3rd base” with a bunch of opportunities. Being in a family where you didn’t have a bad dad, you had no dad. Maybe where you didn’t have an old wreck of a home, your home sometimes had wheels. And moved.

A home where they didn’t tell you to stay away from drugs alcohol and cigarettes, but a home where it was fine to do that stuff, even encouraged. They didn’t tell you to do your homework because they never figured you’d graduate from high school. A place where if you were going to climb the ladder of success, you had to get up to the bottom rung first. In the movie version below, the main character ‘Ponyboy‘ is the 3rd from the left.

Jim Roach

Susan Eloise Hinton’s career as an author began while she was still a student at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Disturbed by the divisions among her schoolmates into two groups–the Greasers and the Socs–Hinton wrote The Outsiders, an honest, sometimes shocking novel told from the point of view of an orphaned 14-year-old Greaser named Ponyboy Curtis. Since her narrator was male, it was decided that Hinton use only her first initials so as not to put off boys who would not normally read books written by women. The Outsiders was published during Hinton’s freshman year at the University of Tulsa, and was an immediate sensation.Today, with more than eight million copies in print, the book is the best-selling young adult novel of all time, and one of the most hauntingly powerful views into the thoughts and feelings of teenagers. The book was also made into a film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and featuring such future stars as Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, and Tom Cruise.Once published, The Outsiders gave her a lot of publicity and fame, and also a lot of pressure. S.E. Hinton was becoming known as “The Voice of the Youth” among other titles. This kind of pressure and publicity resulted in a three year long writer’s block.Her boyfriend (and now, her husband), who had gotten sick of her being depressed all the time, eventually broke this block. He made her write two pages a day if she wanted to go anywhere. This eventually led to That Was Then, This Is Now.In the years since, Ms. Hinton has married and now has a teenaged son, Nick. She continues to write, with such smash successes as That Was Then, This Is Now, Rumble Fish and Tex, almost as well known as The Outsiders. She still lives in Tulsa with her husband and son, where she enjoys writing, riding horses, and taking courses at the university.In a wonderful tribute to Hinton’s distinguished 30-year writing career, the American Library Association and School Library Journal bestowed upon her their first annual Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors authors whose “book or books, over a period of time, have been accepted by young people as an authentic voice that continues to illuminate their experiences and emotions, giving insight into their lives.” – from Amazon