Gather round youngsters, and let me tell you about The Olden Days of YA books. As someone who grew up reading in the 70s and 80s, I speak with authority when I say: they were…not great.
Plastic characters. Improbable situations. Vapid storylines. If this was your experience with YA books, please take some time to check out today’s YA books – which, as a group, are just fantastic!
One set of books that really stood apart from the crowd were S. E. Hinton’s books, most famously the Outsiders. The kids in the stories felt real. They had real problems, and even thought I had never been to Oklahoma, wasn’t male, and wasn’t involved in Soc vs Greaser gang life – it still felt real enough that I felt connected to the characters and the stories.
Are these books great literature? No, definitely not. Would they be the first books I suggest to YA readers today? Again: definitely not. There are so many good books out there now – books that do a good job of talking about the lives of real YAs, that talk about segments of society outside of the too-often-shown rich, straight white kids.
But these books were a bridge from the sludge of prior years to the quality books of today. This was before social media. Before cell phones and photo sharing. Before Overdrive. Before audio books and e-books. Before Amazon. Before the internet. I didn’t even have cable TV! Information about what life was like outside of your area was pretty scarce, so these books – with such a different view into a different life – felt so unique and were a welcome difference.
Check out this article excerpt from Smithsonian magazine, with an interview from Susie Hinton herself! You can read the whole thing here.
“Hinton has nine books to her name, from children’s picture books to a horror novel to a collection of intertwined short stories with adult characters to the coming-of-age works that built her literary career. But none of the others matches the ongoing cultural phenomenon that is The Outsiders. It’s still an English class staple, taught (and occasionally banned) in middle and high schools across the country. The heartfelt movie adaptation has staying power, too. One of its ramshackle filming locations, the Curtis brothers’ home, opened to the public in 2019 as the Outsiders House Museum. And in 2021, the film underwent a 4K restoration that reinstated several beloved scenes from the book that failed to make the original cut.
Hinton may have said all she has to say about The Outsiders, but it remains an American classic, as relevant and beloved today as when it was published more than five decades ago.
By the time she was 15, Hinton had already been churning out stories and poems for eight years. She wrote about what she knew: the ongoing battles between the haves and have-nots. In interviews over the years, Hinton described herself as an observer who grew up in North Tulsa “greaser” (slang for their greased-back hairstyles) territory but wasn’t beholden to any one group. She was a tomboy who loved to read and yearned for honest teenage representation.
The genesis for The Outsiders was an incident in which a friend of Hinton’s was jumped by a carload of upper crust “Socs” (short for “Socials”) and beaten up for being a greaser. The escalation in the high school cliques’long-running rivalryfueled a creative burst that found the 16-year-old finishing the first draft in a week in 1966.
“What I was talking about was real,” Hinton says. “Books at that time for teenagers were ‘Mary Jane goes to prom,’ but [they] didn’t include sneaking in the liquor, which was the main point. Nobody was writing about what was going on in my high school: the social and class warfare.””
“In 1972, Jo Ellen Misakian was a parent with a new job as a librarian at the Lone Star School in Fresno, California. She gave the book to her 13-year-old son, later telling the New York Times, “I had been so frustrated because the kids, the boys especially, didn’t read. Somehow, The Outsiders caught on.” Misakian decided the book should be turned into a movie, so she contacted a Fresno Bee newspaper columnist who pointed her to Parade magazine’s movie editor. The editor, in turn, suggested contacting Hinton, who never responded.
Undeterred, Misakian wrote a letter to Coppola, who had recently produced The Black Stallion, a 1979 film adapted from the classic 1941 children’s book. She pitched him on The Outsiders with an enclosed paperback copy of the novel. Luckily for her, she mistakenly sent it to his New York City office, where he received almost no fan mail. Coppola handed the book off to producing partner Don Roos, who found the cover illustration tacky and didn’t crack it for weeks, but eventually decided to give it ten whole pages on a flight to see if it was any good. Roos read it cover to cover. Not long after, he flew to Tulsa to meet with Hinton. She wasn’t dazzled by Coppola’s cinematic pedigree, including films like The Conversation, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, but as Roos explained when The Outsiders was released in March 1983, “she likes horses and felt The Black Stallion showed we had some affinity for young adult fiction.”
A librarian for the win! We have her to thank for getting us started with turning this book into a movie! If you haven’t seen the movie, you might recognize a few of these young men”