Salinger, short-story writer Shirley Jackson and Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers. The book explicitly or implicitly name checks everyone from Robert Frost (whose writing was not addressed to teenagers, but who most teenagers are compelled to read in high school) to J.D. Although The Outsiders is often held up as a uniquely teenage book, many other classic novels that today we would classify as YA had obviously influenced sixteen-year-old Hinton’s work, Peck wrote. novelist) is the degree to which The Outsiders is derivative of the popular literature of its time,” Dale Peck wrote in 2007, on the book’s 40th birthday. “What struck me most as an adult reader (and sometime Y.A. The book also reflected the books Hinton was reading-the ones not marketed to teenagers. So she wrote one that reflected the “real life” she was surrounded by. “I was surrounded by teens and I couldn’t see anything going on in those books that had anything to do with real life,” she said. And the “handful” that did had protagonists who didn’t reflect her experience. The books Hinton herself was reading when she wrote The Outsiders mostly didn’t have teenage protagonists, she told Michaud. Many of those books, writes Jon Michaud for The New Yorker, “were originally written for adults but have since become favorites among teen-age readers.” Writing during an extremely fertile period in American literature, Hinton was surrounded by great writers dealing with universal themes like loss, belonging and mortality. Instead, Hinton wrote for "real life teens" in her words-teenagers who smoked, drank and fought in everyday settings.
#The outsiders setting serial#
Most books specifically marketed to teens were serial novels and science fiction and, as Hinton once described them, had plots like "Mary Jane goes to the prom." But those classics that teenagers enjoyed were by and large written for adults and co-opted by YA readers. Midcentury classics that feature teenage protagonists like To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and A Wrinkle in Time (1962) had already been published and enjoyed by teenagers and adults alike. Hinton’s first novel was written while she was a teenager busy enduring high school.īut it’s not true that The Outsiders was the first book written for-or about-teenagers and their problems.
After all, unlike the works that preceded it, S.E. It’s hard to argue with those who say that The Outsiders was a watershed moment in young adult literature (often abbreviated as YA).
Teenagers have been finding their world taken seriously in the novel for 50 years now. High school: difficult to live through, harder to get right in writing.Īs a literary voice for teenage strife and disenfranchisement, it’s hard to top The Outsiders.
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