‘Outsiders’ still in demand with teens

TULSA, Okla. -- Beyond its cluster of office towers, Tulsa is a city built close to the ground, a broad clash of neighborhoods you can tell apart by how the grass grows, bright and trim as a putting green in the richer sections, pale and shaggy in the poorer spots.

Tulsa native S.E. Hinton, a cult figure for 40 years since the publication of “The Outsiders,” knows the difference between the wild and the well-kept lawn. Her multimillion-selling book not only helped establish the young adult novel but remains a classic story of gangs at knife’s edge.

Once a teen sensation who wrote her most famous book while still in high school, Hinton is now 59, a dry-witted, sad-eyed woman wearing jeans and sneakers for a recent interview. As a child, she dreamed of writing a book she wanted to read, a novel that told the truth about how kids think. Forty years later, a lot of young people still think she succeeded.

“I get letters from all over the world, saying, ‘It changed my life.’ Who am I to change somebody’s life? It’s not me. It’s in the book,” she says. “If people want to find me, they can. They’ll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner.”

Hinton drove around Tulsa with a reporter on a recent afternoon, pointing out the estates of former oil barons, an overpass where young people were routinely beaten up and the movie theater mentioned at the beginning of “The Outsiders.” She is devoted to Tulsa, with its “bumps, booms and busts,” typical of an oil economy. The restaurants are great -- eating out is a favorite pastime -- there’s room to ride her horses, and people both like her and leave her alone.

A 40th-anniversary edition of “The Outsiders” has just been published, and Hinton, who would rather write than talk about writing, sat and chatted in the library of Will Rogers High School, the very room where she worked on parts of her novel.

“I was exhilarated,” she recalls about that time. “I remember the buzz, the feeling like you’re burning up.”

As a student, Hinton once received a “D” in creative writing, but she is now an honored alumna of Will Rogers High School, her picture displayed behind a glass case to the right of the library, along with such other notables as musician David Gates and singer Anita Bryant. Hinton rarely goes to the high school, but students apparently still like her books enough to steal them, according to librarian Carrie Fleharty.

“I can’t keep them on the shelves,” she says with a laugh. “The kids keep taking them out and ‘forgetting’ to bring them back.”

“The Outsiders” is the raw but hopeful story of rival gangs that features narrator Ponyboy Curtis, the bookish greaser who can quote Robert Frost; macho Dallas Winston, blue eyes “blazing ice, cold with a hatred of the whole world”; and little Johnny Cade, a “dark puppy that has been kicked too many times.”

Tulsa has changed in many ways since Hinton’s childhood, with oil giving way to aircraft parts and healthcare as major industries. But gangs are still a problem, school and police officials agree, and the weapons a lot deadlier than the switchblades carried by the teens in Hinton’s book.

“We have a significant gang presence and a set of issues we have to deal with, but that’s part of what resonates with the kids about her book,” says Will Rogers Principal Kevin Burr. “We try to get the kids to understand that they’re not that different from each other or from kids who grew up in a different era.”

Forty years ago, the battles were fought between the upper-class “Socs” (pronounced “soashes”) and the lower-class -- and lowercase -- “greasers,” gangs so bitter that they entered the school through separate doors. Susan Eloise Hinton, daughter of a salesman and a factory worker, was neither a “greaser” nor a “Soc” but more at home with the greasers, who lived in her neighborhood.

“I just felt being part of my peer group so strongly,” she says. “I was immersed in teen culture but not taken in by it.”

She had been writing stories for much of her life, including a couple of “pretty bad” novels before getting started on “The Outsiders,” inspired after a friend of hers was beaten up on his way home from the movies.

Hinton didn’t even think of publishing the book until the mother of one of her friends read the manuscript and liked it enough to contact an agent in New York. Viking signed her up, for “a small advance,” and with a suggestion that she call herself S.E. in print, so male critics wouldn’t be turned off by a female writer.

“The Outsiders” was published in 1967 but greeted more as a curiosity than a breakthrough. “Can sincerity overcome cliches?” began a brief New York Times review by Thomas Fleming. “In this book by a now 17-year-old author, it almost does the trick.”

“It was overemotional, over the top, melodramatic,” Hinton says. “But its vices were its virtues, because kids feel that way.”

Hinton’s first royalty check was $10, she says, and at one point “The Outsiders” was in danger of going out of print. But librarians and teachers made it a bestseller, and a landmark, a turning point in how literature was presented to students.

“Before ‘The Outsiders,’ textbooks were used for English classes. I remember going to American Library Assn. conferences and they were clamoring for something different. We realized there was a real market for books such as ‘The Outsiders,’ ” says Ron Beuhl, a longtime friend of Hinton’s who worked with her in the 1970s when he was a publisher at Dell and specialized in young adult paperbacks.

For Hinton, fame at any speed was too sudden. She suffered from writer’s block, needing three years to complete her next novel, “That Was Then, This Is Now,” another story of street life in Tulsa that included Ponyboy as a minor character. Other novels, also in and around Tulsa, include “Tex,” “Rumble Fish” and “Taming the Star Runner.”

Hinton has been married since 1970 to her college sweetheart, mathematician and computer scientist David Inhofe (“He doesn’t read and I can’t add,” she jokes), and they have a son, Nick, now in his 20s.

There was a seven-year gap in the 1980s and 1990s as she raised her young son. Before that, in her 20s, she tried teaching but quickly gave up. She became too attached to the students and reasoned, “I could write and help a lot of kids, or teach and help a few, and go nuts.”

According to Viking, a division of Penguin Group USA, “The Outsiders” has sold more than 13 million copies and still sells more than 500,000 a year. It’s standard reading at Will Rogers, including in the classroom of Kim Piper, a 9th-grade English teacher.

“There’s a lot of poverty at Will Rogers, a lot of broken families,” Piper says. “So kids here can especially identify with Ponyboy and his group. It’s what kids that age are thinking about, when they feel kind of isolated from everybody else.”

Inevitably, Piper also shows her students the movie version of “The Outsiders.” Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation, released in 1983 and reissued in 2005, features an uncanny ensemble of young performers who soon became stars: Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio and, in a minor role, Tom Cruise.