Other middle school and high school students have prepared material for you looking at The Outsiders from a variety of different lenses. Their observations will enrich your response to the novel as well as outline the many exciting ways you can engage with The Outsiders in writing.
Research Topic - S.E. Hinton Biography
When most people read a book by S.E. Hinton, they assume that a male wrote it because of the male narrators. S.E. Hinton stands for Susan Eloise Hinton and is actually a woman. She was born on July 22, 1950, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She began her career as a writer in her high school, Will Rogers High School in Tulsa. She enjoyed reading as a kid but didn’t like the young adult literature at the time. This influenced her to be a writer and write books like TheOutsiders.
The Outsiders is S.E. Hinton’s most widely known book. The most amazing thing about The Outsiders is that she started it when she was 15 and finished when she was 16. The Outsiders was based on two gangs in her school, the Greasers and the Socs. She didn’t like how most people in her school had labels (although she didn’t have a label herself). Another inspiration was that one of her friends was jumped by some kids because they didn’t like him being a greaser. Her book became published when her friend’s mother, an author, found out about the book and showed it to a friend, who had an agent. The agent thought it was very good and sold it to a publisher. Hinton received the contract for the book on her graduation day. The reason her name is printed as “S.E. Hinton” is that she wanted the privacy and her publisher suggested it so male reviewers wouldn’t ignore it because it was written by a female. This caused many people to assume that she is a male. The Outsiders was finally published in 1967 by Viking Press and later by Penguin Group Inc.
Hinton went through a 3-year writing block after The Outsiders was published due to the all the pressure and publicity. Her boyfriend ended this block by making her write two pages a day. These two pages a day led to That Was Then, This is Now.
That Was Then, This is Now was a much better piece of literature because Hinton read more great literature and sought to improve her writing. It is a book very similar to The Outsiders. She finished in 1970 and married a few months later. The book is about the friendship between two boys, Mark and Bryon, and how it changes. That Was Then, This is Now was published a year later in 1971.
Hinton’s next two books to be published were Rumble Fish in 1975 and Tex in 1979. Rumble Fish was her shortest novel and originally a short story published in a 1968 edition of Nimrod, an international journal of prose and poetry. Rumble Fish received mixed reviews. Some people loved it and others hated it. Four years later Hinton’s book Tex was published. It got very good reviews and people commented on her improved writing style. Some similarities between the two the two books are violence, death, and a first person narrator (which is something that a lot of her books share).After Tex, it would be nine years until she published another book.
Some important events took place 4 years after Tex was published. First The Outsiders movie came out in March. Then her son Nicholas David was born in August. And finally the movie Rumble Fish was released in November. Two years after that (1985), the movie That Was Then, This is Now went into theaters. Hinton starred in minor roles in all of these movies except That Was Then, This is Now as well as the movie Tex, released in 1982.
In 1988 Hinton was the first person to be awarded with the YASD/SLJ Author Achievement Award by the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association and School Library Journal. But this was not her only award. She also was a winner of The Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award.
As well as receiving the YASD/SLJ Author Achievement Award in 1988, S.E. Hinton published Taming Star Runner in October. An interesting thing about Taming Star Runner is that it was her first book that was not in the first person. Her next book would be released in 7 years (1995) and would surprise many people.
The surprise was that Hinton started to write children’s literature. Big David, Little David was a picture book for very young children. Straying from Teen Fiction reflected the importance of family to her at the time. S.E. Hinton wrote yet another children’s book: The Puppy Sister. The Puppy Sister was a chapter book written for elementary school children.
Hinton left that genre and moved to adult literature. HawkesHarbor was published in 2004 and the short stories Some of Tim’s Stories in 2006.
S.E. Hinton now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with David, her husband. She is now 59 and her only son Nick has gone to college. As well as writing she enjoys reading and has horseback riding as a hobby.
In 1967, S.E. Hinton accomplished her goal of becoming a published writer. Although she was 16 when she wrote The Outsiders, it only got published when she was in her freshman year of college. Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1948. She aspired to be a writer since she was young, and spent years practicing writing before she wrote her first novel. Despite her success that came along with her first novel, The Outsiders, she struggled with several problems during the writing of the book and the period after.
The issues Hinton faced prior to writing The Outsiders led her to actually write it. First of all, she was angry with the social situation at her school, although she didn’t have a label. She wasn’t desperate to join a group, which allowed her to be friends with people from different crowds. Another thing that pushed her to write The Outsiders was that her father was dying of cancer. In her junior year, he passed away, and she only worked harder as he got worse. Hinton also hated that all the books written for young adults featured characters who had to tackle the smallest of problems. She wanted a young adult novel that was real. Few people know the real reasons why S.E. Hinton wrote her first book.
There are multiple opinions on who S.E. Hinton really is. Some think that she was a greaser herself. Many people, including myself, easily believe this “myth” because it’s written from a greaser’s point of view. Others decided that she was a social critic, commenting on the social structure of her town. It was the easiest belief to consider true because the social status of everyone is a main focus of the book. Also, there are others who believed that she was some sort of hard-core teenager who pumped out books like a machine. This was supported because all of her books are so successful. Although there are several theories on who Hinton is, none of them are accurate.
After writing The Outsiders, Hinton struggled through a writer’s block which lasted three years. None of the fame went to her head, but she felt intense pressure to write another amazing book. During that writer’s block, she had trouble doing anything if it included writing. For example, she says that writing a letter had become an impossible task for her to accomplish in those three years. However, her boyfriend pulled her out of that phase. He had her write two pages of a story before doing anything else each day. This resulted in the book That Was Then, This Is Now, which she finished the same year she started writing again. In the years following, she wrote seven more books, including two children’s books.
Despite the difficulties S.E. Hinton struggled through, she managed to write 9 successful books. Some of her obstacles she faced gave her things to write about, like the social issues at school. Hinton also dealt with assumptions on who she was. She overcame fame and pressure caused by writing The Outsiders to create even more loved books. I know that if I wrote an award-winning book at age 16, fame would overcome me, and I might not even try to write another novel for years. On the other hand, S.E. Hinton seemed unaffected by the fame, and continued to display her passion of writing through the years.
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Juvenile Delinquency and The Outsiders
Juvenile delinquency plays a large role in S. E. Hinton’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Outsiders. According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, juvenile delinquency can be described as “a violation of the law committed by a juvenile,” or people under the age of 18. It has been a problem around the world for many decades now, from the time that The Outsiders is based on up to today. In the story, the reader learns that Ponyboy, the main characters and his gang smoke, shoplift, and have fights with the rich Socs. That is a perfectly reasonable view of places like Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1960’s, where juvenile delinquency was very common. Even today, many of the “criminal acts” are similar to the ones in the past, despite a few new ones. What drives people to shoplift, be part of a gang, or do drugs? There are many theories, each as credible as the next, behind the cause of juvenile delinquency.
One major theory, which is probably the most simple, is rational choice, where the person freely chooses to behave the way they do, for no apparent reason. In The Outsiders, Dallas Winston can be seen as a character that does whatever he wants simply because he can. “He had quite a reputation. . . . He had been arrested, he got drunk, he rode in rodeos, lied, cheated, stole, rolled drunks, jumped small kids. . . .” Some people believe they are above the law or just don’t care about what they do. Although the author does not mention it in the novel, there could be a possibility that parental influence causes Dally to do what he does, which leads us to the theory of family environment.
Parents have an enormous impact on their children’s lives; they are who we learn proper manners and moral values from. These lessons create the foundation for what kind of people we grow up to be. On the contrary, if parents do not discipline, take care of, or abuse/neglect their children, then they are more likely to become a juvenile delinquent. Johnny Cade is an example of the result of poor adult supervision. In the novel, Johnny’s parents abuse him and probably have no love for him. Their poor relationship plays a factor in Johnny being part of a gang, having delinquent friends, even if he is the “most-abiding” of them all.
For some reason, all of the characters in The Outsiders who are juvenile delinquents are male. The “male phenomenon” theory is based on that idea that adolescent males try to show off their aggressiveness, daring, or masculinity by committing crimes. This could possibly be the case with the Socs, who try to beat up greasers just for fun. When they gang up on one person, it makes them think that they’re being tough and cool. This could also be the case for Dally. At the movies, he is rude to the two Soc girls, perhaps because he wants to impress them or try to look cool like Bob and the other Socs. This theory could be true for any juvenile delinquent, just like every other one. There are many possibilities for why people would commit crimes, but does it make a difference why?
In The Outsiders, some of the juvenile delinquent characters end up becoming heroes, whereas in real life, that is usually not the case. In the novel, and in real life, everyone has a reason why they do what they do. Juvenile delinquents simply don’t make good choices, and no theory can justify why. All of the theories behind the cause of juvenile delinquency can be true, which is why they remain theories and not fact. In the end, it’s up to the individual to choose to offend or not to. If only all juvenile delinquents would become heroes like Ponyboy and Johnny. Alas, it is unfortunate that that cannot be true in the real world.
Greasers and Pop Culture
Greaser Style
It's not like one day a young hoodlum woke up and decides to put goo in his hair to look cool. No, instead they get this idea from a greater influence. Who better than to come up with the one and only Elvis Presley! Can you picture the resemblance? Hair grease consisted of various wax, gel creams, tonics, pomade, olive oil, or petroleum jelly (Vaseline). Often times in movies about the 1950-1960s a young greaser will notice their reflection in some rather shiny reflective surface. He whips out a fine toothed rat-tail comp and slicks back his hair or smoothes over some unruly bumps. Greasers commonly have long hairstyles such as pompadours, the quiff, Ducks A**, or just slicked back.
Proper Greaser attire consists of a simple T-shirt sometimes with sleeves rolled up, a bowling shirt, or a wife-beater. Along with that, often times, they sport a work jacket, denim jacket, a signature gang jacket, or a leather jacket. In the movie Grease Danny Zuko has a jacket that has “T-birds” printed on the back with an image of a bird in flight, it resembles his gang specifically. Other gangs in the movie also have signature group jackets such as the “pink ladies” or “the scorpions” printed on them. For the bottom attire greasers wore jeans or “baggy cotton twill work trousers”. Boots are a greaser’s favorite. According to Wikipedia, “Greasers also typically wore motorcycle boots, such as harness boots and engineer boots; army boots;” They accessorize using things like chains wallets, various bandanas and caps.
Greaser music
Greaser tunes mostly consisted of Rockabilly music. Rockabilly music is an early type of 50s rock-n-roll. Gangs in the south mostly listened to rockabilly music because it originated there. Wikipedia says “Other important influences on rockabilly include western swing, boogie woogie, and rhythm and blues. Although there are notable exceptions, its origins lie primarily in thesouthern United States.” Popular rockabilly artists of the time were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jonny Cash. When Rockabilly turned to be an international sensation, British fans called themselves Teddy Boys. Rockabilly also had a great influences on the Beatles.
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