The Outsiders is an outstanding story of teenage rebellion, written when the author was only 17 years old.
Youngsters in a small Oklahoma town have split into two gangs, divided by money, tastes and attitude. The Socs' idea of having a good time is beating up Greasers like Ponyboy Curtis. Ponyboy knows what to expect and knows he can count on his brothers and friends - until the night someone takes things too far.
Penguin Books
I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.
Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold . . .
It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset
Can you see the sunset real good on the West side? You can see it on the East side too.
It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too
They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.
You get tough like me and you don't get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin' can touch you..
Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the things you want to see..
I've been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That's gold. Keep that way, it's a good way to be.
Get smart and nothing can touch you
S.E. Hinton, was and still is, one of the most popular and best known writers of young adult fiction. Her books have been taught in some schools, and banned from others. Her novels changed the way people look at young adult literature.
Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has always enjoyed reading but wasn't satisfied with the literature that was being written for young adults, which influenced her to write novels like The Outsiders. That book, her first novel, was published in 1967 by Viking.
Once published, The Outsiders gave her a lot of publicity and fame, and also a lot of pressure. S.E. Hinton became known as "The Voice of the Youth" among other titles.
As a young American author, S.E. Hinton decided to write under her initials in order to deflect attention from her gender. She set out to write about the difficult social system that teenagers create among themselves. Her books struck a chord with readers who saw in her characters many elements of this system that existed in their own schools and towns.
S.E.Hinton.com/Britannica
The Outsiders is very much a product of its time and place. Elements of author S.E. Hinton’s real life in the mid-1960s can be found throughout the novel. Despite these specific characteristics, however, the story is written to be universal, a story for young adults everywhere.
GANG CULTURE
S.E. Hinton was fifteen years old when she began composing The Outsiders. However, by this young age, she had already learned enough about the world around her to become dissatisfied by what she saw. The main source of Hinton’s anger was the social-class divide among the students at her high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
On one side of this separation were the greasers, a gang of poor, lower-class young people from the east side of the city. This was the group of which Hinton considered herself a friend, though she never actually joined the gang formally. The opposing gang—referred to as the Socs, or Socials, in the novel—consisted of the wealthy students on Tulsa’s west side.
The central conflicts between the two groups were their social and economic classes. The greasers did not like the wealthy class because they had more money, while the wealthy did not like the greasers because they were poor. This disagreement is what had originally given rise to the gang mentality of the two groups. Poor students joined the greasers because the gang offered them understanding and the feeling of belonging; the same applied to the wealthy gang. Without even thinking that opposing gang members could ever understand one another, the gangs simply became enemies for life. It was the resulting tension and violence between the groups that Hinton attempted to capture in The Outsiders. The major difference between her real life and her novel, however, was that in the story, the greaser Ponyboy learns that he actually has much in common with the Soc girl Cherry. He only needed to allow himself to see her as a person rather than a Soc for this to happen.
The Outsiders: Historical Context. (2015). In Research in Context. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/RPDVYG258997395/MSIC?u=64_ufcc&sid=MSIC&xid=b5febf44
