Bibliofreakblog

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

If you read any sentence of this book out loud to my sister, Sally, she can tell you want is happening in the story.  She’s probably read it eight times.  This was, in fact, a game that I liked to play with her when I read it–I would have been 11, she would have been 20.  

These ages are important, because taken together you get the average of Hinton’s own age when she first wrote and published this book in 1967.  Yes.  She was fifteen when she wrote and 16 when it came out.

The story behind the story goes that Hinton was sick about reading books about boys and prom and so decided to write her own teen book, basing it on her school’s own social stratification, definitively defined as the greasers at the lower end of the economic spectrum and the socs (pronounced “soshes”, short for socials) on the upper end.  And these greasers?  They’re not your John Travolta type greasers who pull pranks at school and break out into song.  Just sayin’.

The protagonists of this story, as the title might suggest, are greasers.  The narrator, Ponyboy Curtis (yes, that’s his real name–it says so on his birth certificate) is the youngest of three boys, whose parents have died.  All of their friends come from similarly struggling and broken homes.  

This book has been embraced by many adolescents, and faced its fair share of controversy–mainly due to violence, underage drinking, smoking, etc.  But these are issues that Hinton faced, and people still face today, young and old.

Ponyboy is a little bit different from the rest of the greasers.  He reads Gone with the Wind and recites Robert Frost (this was my first introduction to Robert Frost, and I can still recite “Nothing Gold Can Stay”–one of the book’s themes–from heart).  Plus, his oldest brother, Darry, tries to keep him out of trouble, from both the law, and violence with the socs.  

That of course, doesn’t happen.

And no, nothing gold can stay.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

Rumblefish (F) by S.E. Hinton
That Was Then, This Is Now (F) by S.E. Hinton
The Catcher in the Rye (F) by J.D. Salinger
Girl (F) by Blake Nelson 
Hatchet (F) by Gary Paulson
Story of a Girl (F) by Sara Zarr
Prep (F) by Curtis Simmons
House on Mango Street (F) by Sandra Cisneros
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (F) by Steven Chbosky
Monster (F) by Walter Dean Meyers
The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian (F) by Sherman Alexie
Flight (F) by Sherman Alexie 
Go Ask Alice (F) by Anonymous

Other works by S.E. Hinton:

Tex (F)
Rumblefish (F)
That Was Then This Is Now (F)
The Taming the Star Runner (F)
Hawkes Harbor (F)
Some of Tim’s Stories (F)
Big David, Little David (F)
The Puppy Sister (F)