S.E. Hinton
1976
Laurel Leaf - New York
S.E. Hinton started writing The Outsiders when she was 15.
I was about 13 or 14 when I read it the first time. Maybe younger. Middle-School English Class with Mrs. Blankenship. I didn't really get it then, of course. Certainly not in the same way I get it now.
According to Wikipedia, The Outsiders has been frequently challenged and pushed to be banned from school libraries and reading curriculum because of its portrayal of gang violence, underage drinking and smoking, and "underage slang," whatever the hell that is.
Why would anyone want to sacrifice meaningful content on the altar of antebellum sensibilities when the niceties and pretensions the censors would hope to convey are so utterly destroyed by mainstream culture? It's like the weirdos trying to get Harry Potter banned because of wizardry or anyone expecting anything sane to come out of Sarah Palin.
It just makes normal people roll their eyes.
If anything The Outsiders is an anti-gang novel, and if the halfwits who criticized literature would take the time to read it before attempting to restrict its free and open circulation, they would recognize things like this.
I read most of The Outsiders sitting on my back porch eating watermellon. (I would be finishing up a collection of post-apocalyptic short stories, but I can't find my Kindle... sad face... sad fugee face).
It's short, yes, but I really don't understand what makes this fiction for "young adults." The content is just as compelling and complex as Of Mice and Men, which no one would dare drop into the box of Youth Fiction, but which is read worldwide by English students.
Hinton's age at the time of publication may have had something to do with the label The Outsiders received. The only thing, in my mind, separating this novel from any other is its obvious lack of "foul language." Novels don't need excessive swearing in them to be good, as The Outsiders shows, but swearing is descriptive language, and people do use it. To omit it from otherwise realistic novels is, in my opinion, selling your characters short.
The cover for my copy of the book is... different. I think my copy was an ex-school copy. It's a small hardcover, made by these folks, who apparently market their products to schools. This is the kind of book that your 7th grade teacher would've checked out to you and you would have to check back in-- she likely kept it in a cabinet, along with a few dozen copies of other titles you'd heard of but were never asked to read.
The kids on the cover of my copy look neither like the Greasers described, nor the Socs. The kids on my cover look like mods, which is weird. Greasers are described to look like Rockers and the Soc bastards are described to look like this, only a little younger:
I had to look up "madras." Horrendous. Rich people do the silliest things sometimes.
Continuing the discussion from Orphans of The Sky, I think book covers are neat. They change over time while the content remains the same. It's like looking at an old advertisement for Taco Bell. I tend to enjoy older book covers, even covers with no image-- just color. That seems a lot more meaningful to me than some cartoonish and unrealistic representation of what the novel's characters might possibly be like.
I'm looking at the cover of the next book I'm going to read: S.E. Hinton's That Was Then, This Is Now.
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