In the case of Hinton, this decision was encouraged by Velma Varner, her editor at Viking, who believed that using her given name (S.E. Curiously, for such a female-centric segment of publishing, The Outsiders, like Harry Potter, that other game-changer of children’s literature, focuses on a male protagonist, while its female author initially obscured her gender. T he Outsiders depicts a group of lost boys - the orphaned Curtis brothers and their gang of “greasers” - visited by the wise-beyond-her years ingenue Cherry Valance (played by a young Diane Lane in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation). Various editions of The Outsiders, in print and well loved since 1967. Today Hinton’s debut still reads like a master class. deals with adolescents leaving behind their parents’ realm (for better or worse by choice or otherwise) and facing the challenges of being an individual in society for the first time. Novels of the type Hinton derided, in a 1967 piece for The New York Times Book Review, as, “Mary Jane’s big date with the football hero,” are still churned out, but more often Y.A. She originally began working on her debut, “because I wanted to read a book that dealt realistically with teen life as I saw it.” This impulse has had a lasting influence on literature. The stories available to teenagers at that time, “bore no resemblance to what I saw going on,” Hinton told Interview magazine in 1999. The Outsiders-which still sells half a million copies every year-forever changed the way books are written for young readers. Because she wasn’t yet 21, her mother had to sign too. Her contract from Viking Press actually arrived the day she graduated from Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School.
Hinton was an Oklahoma high school student when she completed the manuscript she was then calling A Different Sunset. We are not, by the way, talking about some urbane 19-year-old groomed for the elite cultural circles of Manhattan. The aura surrounding the classic tale of warring adolescent cliques from opposite sides of the tracks is enhanced by the fact that the author was herself a teenager. This was 1967, so youth culture was not exactly new, but something about the plain, emotional voice of The Outsiders did away with the grownups’ interference and spoke directly to teen readers in a new way. Fifty years ago this spring, the best selling young adult novel of all time was published to adulation and outrage.
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