S. E. Hinton

• Born: July 22, 1948
• Place of Birth: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Biography

Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is also the setting for her fiction. In her junior year of high school, her father died of cancer; that same year, at the age of seventeen, she completed the manuscript for The Outsiders (1967). She enrolled in the University of Tulsa in 1966, and the novel was published in her freshman year. She graduated in 1970 with a degree in education. She and her husband, David Inhofe, live in Tulsa, where their son, Nicholas David, was born in 1983.

While Hinton has given several interviews, she remains a private and rather shadowy figure. The myths that have grown up about her—that she was herself a gang member like the young “greasers” she depicts so graphically in The Outsiders, for example—are probably more a tribute to her novels: Her young fans get so involved in her work that they imagine more about her than can be true. Her private life has remained just that, and she has gained the most publicity by involving herself in two of the film productions of her novels: She was present on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders in 1983 (she plays a minor part as a nurse in the film), and she wrote the screenplay for Coppola’s film version of Rumble Fish (the novel was published in 1975) later that year.

By the time Hinton was thirty-one, she had four major young adult works under her belt and was considered by many critics and teachers to be one of the most important figures in the development of the young adult novel. In July 1988, she was awarded the first YASD/SLJ Author Achievement Award, given by the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association and School Library Journal, for novels that provide young adults “a window through which they can view their world and which [can] help them to grow and to understand themselves and their role in society.”

In 2009, Hinton published a short story collection titled Some of Tim's Stories. The fourteen loosely linked stories include concise depictions of two male cousins. During a drug bust, one of the cousins gets caught and goes to prison, while one escapes. The protagonists are in their mid-twenties, rather than in their teens, but the story is narrated with Hinton's typical gritty realism. In 2016, a fan of Hinton's books bought the house in Oklahoma where The Outsiders movie was filmed to turn the house into a museum filled with memorabilia about the book and Hinton's work. Hinton has said in interviews that the book continues to engage young readers decades after its original publication. In 2024, a musical adaptation of The Outsiders won a Tony Award for Best Musical, among other honors.

Analysis

In April 1967, Viking Press published Hinton’s The Outsiders, and its appearance marked the start of what has since become known as young adult, or YA, literature. Prior to that date, literature for adolescents comprised leftover children’s literature (such as Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1903) or adult novels that had been adopted by younger readers (such as Harper Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird). The few works that were aimed specifically at the youth market (the novels of John Tunis or Maureen Daly) were simplistic and moralistic, even to adolescent readers.

In 1967 all that changed, and a new genre was born, thanks in large part to Hinton. Since that date, the genre of young adult fiction has developed into a major cultural force, and publishers regularly deploy editors and even whole divisions to work in the teenage market. What marks this genre, and what distinguishes it from the “juvenile” literary forms that existed before 1967, is that young adult literature talks to adolescents realistically about matters that concern them, in language that is their own.

The novels of Robert Cormier, M. E. Kerr, Paul Zindel, Richard Peck, and dozens of other young adult writers cover experiences that were absent from adolescent literature before the 1960s, but that are on the minds of teenagers nevertheless—including sex, death, and divorce. At times, young adult novels can be romantic and melodramatic, but the most significant young adult books are noteworthy for what has been called their “new realism,” for their attempts to render adolescent experience as it is really lived by teenagers. Sickness, alcoholism, single-parent families—these and other problems have become the focus of the genre.

Hinton has been an important part of this movement from the very beginning. In fact, her career has paralleled the development of the genre as she has added works to it: After The Outsiders in 1967, That Was Then, This Is Now was published in 1971, Rumble Fish in 1975, Tex in 1979, and Taming the Star Runner—after a gap of nine years (her son was born in 1983)—in 1988. More than ten million copies of these novels have been printed since 1967, and popular films of the first four have been viewed by many millions more. Hinton’s work has been at the center of any discussion of the young adult genre. In 1995, she published two works of children’s literature, Big David, Little David and The Puppy Sister. In 2004, her work Hawkes Harbor—an adult, horror-themed novel—came out.

It has been argued that Hinton’s development as a writer has been disappointing; readers may find that her fourth and fifth novels, for example, differ only slightly from her earliest ones. Rather than expanding into new literary directions, she has attempted to perfect her basic story and storytelling technique. Put more positively, her literary career has been based on a limited, although successful, formula: Her protagonists are all white male adolescents, and at the center of each of her novels is the story of a special relationship between two of them, usually brothers.

Hinton has been accused of sexism, and her female characters are indeed decidedly weaker than her male characters. As in much young adult fiction, adult characters play minor roles in Hinton’s novels, and they tend to be weak and ineffective. The young males learn about life from themselves, or through the intense, often violent interactions with one another.

Her first four novels are all told by first-person narrators in which a young boy narrates his adventures with other males. While all the novels are set in Tulsa (or an urban/rural area much like it), there is also a very generalized quality to the novels: They could be anywhere, or nowhere, for there are very few historical references to date or place her works. In a sense, this happens because Hinton is writing a modern form of the medieval allegory, in which the focus is on characters wrestling with moral or ethical problems.

There is much violence in the novels, some romance (but no sex), and sanitized language that few parents would find offensive. For this reason, it seems odd that her novels, and especially the first, The Outsiders, should have been banned in a number of communities; the cause may have been the shock of the realistic descriptions of gang “rumbles.” Her plots are loose or episodic and often melodramatic; clearly her focus, and her strength, is her characterization, and it is her characters that readers remember: Ponyboy Curtis (The Outsiders), Bryon Douglas (That Was Then, This Is Now), and Tex. She generally, and especially in these first-person narrators, creates characters that are interesting and believable. Adolescents, as well as others, read her novels avidly and identify quickly with the tough but sensitive people she creates.

The Outsiders

First published: 1967

Type of work: Novel

Fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis narrates the story of his coming-of-age in a world of gangs and gang violence.

When Hinton published The Outsiders in 1967, she used her initials so that readers would think she was a man. It was assumed by publishers, in that pre-young adult era, that readers would not believe that a woman could write realistically about the urban street world that Hinton’s first novel depicts. It is a sign of how far the genre has evolved since 1967 that The Outsiders seems so tame today.

The novel is set in a small southwestern city (similar to Tulsa), but in some ways it could be any city in the United States, for the novel is vague and dreamy in form. There are few adults, and the world of The Outsiders is divided into wealthy “Socs” (short for “socials”) and “greasers,” the tough gang members who dress in their early-1960’s uniform of long hair, blue jeans, and T-shirts. The three Curtis brothers—Darry, the oldest, Soda, the middle, and Ponyboy, the narrator—live together and have taken care of one another since their parents were killed in an automobile crash some years before. Surrounding the Curtises are other teenagers who share greaser values and the Curtis hospitality.

The action in this short novel is, as in most young adult fiction, simple and straightforward and covers only a few days. After an argument with his older brother, Ponyboy and his friend Johnny run to a nearby park, where they are attacked by a carload of Socs, angry at the greasers for picking up their girls earlier that evening. In the fight, Johnny stabs and kills Bob, the Soc leader, and Johnny and Ponyboy are forced to flee the city, with the help of Dally Winston, the toughest greaser in the novel. Later, in a fire in the church where they are hiding out, Dally, Johnny, and Ponyboy manage to rescue trapped children and become heroes. The death of Bob leads to a major rumble, however, and the greasers defeat the Socs in this violent finale. Johnny dies of his wounds from the fire; Dally goes wild, robs a grocery store, and is gunned down by the police.

In the brief denouement, Ponyboy thinks of the hundreds of greasers like himself who are misunderstood and decides that someone should tell their story: “Maybe people would understand then and wouldn’t be so quick to judge a boy by the amount of hair oil he wore.” He picks up a pen and begins the theme for his English class that will become The Outsiders: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house . . . ”

The major theme of the novel is the story of Ponyboy’s successful initiation: He has survived the rumble, worked out his relationship with his brother Darry, and, despite the deaths of two friends, is a better and stronger person by novel’s end. The story of Pony’s initiation also has a number of subthemes. The first is what could be called the brotherhood theme. Loyalty is a cardinal gang rule, and the rumble at the end of the novel is only a particularly violent and ritualistic enactment of this value. Dally dies, in fact, because he became a loner and broke away from his supportive greaser gang.

Working with this brotherhood idea is the more important theme of eliminating prejudice. The greasers and Socs of the novel represent two clear socioeconomic groups in this world, and their ignorance and hatred of each other are what lead to the class warfare. Differences are created by social class, Hinton says, but underneath these superficial differences are people who share more than what separates them. As Ponyboy discovers, the sunset can be seen equally well from both sides of town.

How can the characters recognize this “family of man” that they all share? One obvious answer is in being sensitive to and tolerant of the world around them and breaking down the prejudice and ignorance that keep them from this recognition. In their sanctuary, Johnny and Ponyboy share Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and later, in his dying note to Ponyboy, Johnny says that Frost “meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green. When you’re a kid everything’s new, dawn. . . . Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. . . . There’s still lots of good in the world.”

The good exists if one can retain one’s childlike innocence and capacity for wonder. Ponyboy begins the novel in response to Johnny’s counsel; his sensitivity and intelligence lead him to try to tell the story of the greasers and the Socs, and what links them.

There are a number of literary allusions for a work this short: Aside from the Frost poem, there are references to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861) and to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). The novel also contains a very literary three-part structure (city, country escape, city) reminiscent of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Other literary echoes include William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) and the film West Side Story (1957). A deceptively simple story, The Outsiders is a fairly complex novel and one with a number of thematic strains and literary devices.

When director Coppola made the film of The Outsiders in 1983, he took the same respectful attitude toward the work as the adolescents from Fresno, California, who had written urging him to translate the book to film, and the film plays like an adolescent fantasy. There is a vagueness to both novel and film that one usually finds only in the world of romance: Characters are two-dimensional and play out preordained roles, setting is generalized and abstract, there is no sense of historical time (the story is taking place in the early 1960s, readers guess, but mostly from the clothing), and the plot essentially consists of a series of ritualistic set pieces.

The novel, like the film, has been extremely popular with teenagers—probably because it was one of the first young adult books to deal with social classes as teenagers actually view them. Written when Hinton was only seventeen, The Outsiders was the first novel to deal sympathetically with “greasers,” to describe adolescent outsiders not as hoodlums or juvenile delinquents but as normal young people locked into class roles and conflicts. The freshness of its young author’s vision explains much of the book’s popularity.

That Was Then, This Is Now

First published: 1971

Type of work: Novel

In his passage from childhood innocence to adult maturity, Bryon Douglas learns about the high cost of friendship.

In many ways, That Was Then, This Is Now is a sequel to The Outsiders, for the setting in this second Hinton novel is similar, and some of the same characters appear. It is a few years later, however, and the concerns in this adolescent world have changed.

Mark Jennings, fifteen, has been living with Bryon Douglas and his mother since Mark’s parents killed each other in a drunken fight seven years before. Mark and Bryon, the sixteen-year-old narrator of the novel, are as close as brothers—and perhaps too close. As the story unravels, it becomes apparent that Mark has been dealing drugs, and it is those drugs that permanently damage M&M, the brother of Bryon’s girlfriend, Cathy Carlson. Bryon grows in the course of the novel, especially in his relationship with Cathy, but Mark does not. When Bryon discovers the truth about Mark, he turns him over to the police, and the younger boy is sentenced to five years in the state reformatory.

Bryon does not have the consolation of Cathy; feeling guilty over what he has done to Mark, Bryon pushes her away, and she is going out with an older Ponyboy Curtis at novel’s end. The novel thus concludes on a sad and somber note: Bryon wishes that he were a kid again, “when I had all the answers.” He has left the security of childhood and paid a high price for his growth to maturity, losing his two best friends in the process. There are, he has learned, few easy answers to life’s tough questions.

While characterization in That Was Then, This Is Now may be somewhat unsophisticated, character development certainly is not; there is a definite, if gradual, growth that is missing in Hinton’s first novel. Bryon grows to be able to care about people outside his family: Cathy, M&M, and others. Caring does not guarantee happiness, Hinton implies—“Nothing can wear you out like caring about people,” Mark complains at one point—but it is the only full way to live. The novel ends on a depressing note, uncharacteristic for such an early young adult novel, but a realistic sign of things to come in the genre.

That Was Then, This Is Now extends the themes of The Outsiders. Readers learn the limitations to the lessons of loyalty, for example: Loyalty to the gang was simpler in the first novel, but here loyalty is conditioned by time and place, and a character may be forced to turn in a sibling if he or she violates the law.

The world of That Was Then, This Is Now, in short, is broader and more complex than that of The Outsiders, yet Hinton is even more programmatic in this second book. She clearly has messages she wishes to send to young readers: about the dangers of drugs (both taking and dealing them), about the limits of group loyalty, and about the complexity of the real social world. If Hinton tends to be more realistic in her downbeat conclusion here, the lessons along the way seem much more didactic.

At the same time, the style of the second novel seems looser than the first. Bryon’s narrative voice does not have the same compelling conviction as does Ponyboy’s in The Outsiders. Hinton seems to know—and to like—Ponyboy better, and Bryon’s slangy adolescent voice is often vague. Setting, as in the original, is generalized; profanity and sexual activity are again both missing. Literary language, on the other hand, as in most of Hinton’s work, is quite effective. Mark, for example, is consistently characterized through the novel’s imagery as a lion.

That Was Then, This Is Now does not have the spark of Hinton’s first novel. The author at age twenty-one had lost a certain freshness she had at seventeen and had not yet been able to replace it with sufficient knowledge or experience. That Was Then, This Is Now has several important themes and good character development, but it lacks the force and vitality of The Outsiders.

Rumble Fish

First published: 1975

Type of work: Novel

Rusty-James learns about the world from his older brother, Motorcycle Boy; then the latter is killed.

Rumble Fish contains many elements of the successful Hinton formula, in which a young male protagonist narrates the story of his often violent experiences during a crucial period of growing up. There are few adults or women who intrude on this romantic male stage, where the protagonist—like the reader—learns a number of important lessons about the world and people’s roles in it. The names of the characters hint at the novel’s allegorical mode: “Rusty-James” and “Motorcycle Boy,” respectively, the narrator and the older brother who gives the narrator his lessons. The distinction of Rumble Fish is the intensity of its negative message.

If anything, Rumble Fish is more violent and action-packed than Hinton’s earlier novels, for it includes a number of gang battles, from the early fight between Rusty-James and Buff Wilcox to Motorcycle Boy’s violent death. Rusty-James is stabbed in that first rumble but is patched up by Motorcycle Boy at home, where the reader discovers that their mother has escaped to California and the two boys live with their alcoholic father. Time after time in the novel, Rusty-James has similar violent encounters, only to be saved by Motorcycle Boy, who appears out of nowhere, like a knight from a medieval romance.

Motorcycle Boy is not able in the end to save himself, however: Trying to free the “rumble fish” of the title by taking them from the pet store where they are sold and pouring them into the river, he is shot and killed by police. Rusty-James is taken to a reformatory. Six years later, Rusty-James encounters his friend Steve from this period on a beach in Southern California. It is clear that Steve would like to reconnect with Rusty-James, but the narrator has no such illusions: “I waved back. I wasn’t going to see him. I wasn’t going to meet him for dinner, or anything else. I figured if I didn’t see him, I’d start forgetting again. But it’s been taking me longer than I thought it would.”

What Rusty-James has been trying to forget, apparently, is the death of Motorcycle Boy and the memories of that painful period.

What makes Rumble Fish different from earlier Hinton works is the darkness of this vision. Here is no happy ending, as in The Outsiders, and no bittersweet lesson about growing up, as in That Was Then, This Is Now. What readers find instead is a novel about the impossibility of escaping the past, or one’s own biological destiny, and the finality of ending alone.

Also different is the mode of the novel: Rumble Fish has a dreamy, almost mythic mood to it. (Coppola’s film version of the novel captured this quality perfectly, in its mixed use of color and black-and-white photography.) The character of Motorcycle Boy is more romantic, and thus less realistic, than any previous character in Hinton’s novels. The mixed critical reaction to the work—much stronger than to earlier Hinton novels—indicates this difficulty. Many critics of young adult fiction had trouble dealing with a work that was so much darker and more somber and stylistically moodier.

Tex

First published: 1979

Type of work: Novel

Through his struggles with and against his brother Mason, Tex McCormick grows into his world and himself.

In many ways, Tex is the most successful fulfillment of the Hinton formula. The novel avoids the pitfalls of the earlier romantic versions of the Hinton story, and it succeeds where Hinton is best: in characterization and in relevant themes. The standard Hinton elements are here, but they coalesce as they never have before.

Tex and Mason McCormick have almost been abandoned by their father, who is following the rodeo circuit, and Mason has developed an ulcer taking care of Tex, being a star athlete, and working to get into college. He is even forced to sell Tex’s horse, Negrito, when the two boys run out of money. The action is fast-paced: Tex and his friend Johnny are constantly getting into trouble, Tex and Johnny’s sister Jamie develop a romance, and Mason’s friend Lem is dealing drugs. In one of the multiple climaxes, Tex saves Mason’s life when a hitchhiker pulls a gun on them. When Tex accompanies Lem on a drug deal, however, he himself is shot by one of the customers and ends up in the hospital. In the novel’s denouement, Tex discovers who his real father is, and the various strands of this novel are neatly resolved.

Tex works because readers are carried along by the story and because the major characters are believable and sympathetic. The ideas in the novel work as well. Again there is the theme of “outsiders”—orphans, abandoned children, and loners. The resolution is much more satisfactory than it was in Rumble Fish (where readers last saw Motorcycle Boy dead and Rusty-James sitting alone on the California beach): Tex gains a new father (at least his name) and a new sense of family, works out his problems with his brother, and begins a romance. The conclusion is not without worries: “Love ought to be a real simple thing,” Tex complains in the end. “Animals don’t complicate it, but with humans it gets so mixed up it’s hard to know what you feel, much less how to say it.”

Tex has a more mature ending than Hinton’s previous novels and an affirmative ending for its youthful readers. Tex does not end up dead, in jail, or alone. In spite of the strikes against him (both from his environment and from within himself), he manages to survive and succeed.

Taming the Star Runner

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Stranded on an isolated Oklahoma horse ranch, Travis Harris manages to fall in love, become a novelist, and save a friend.

In Taming the Star Runner, Hinton tries a different approach to telling her story: She abandons her first-person narration for a third-person point of view. The intensity which had earlier carried readers along in the voices of Ponyboy Curtis or Tex is replaced by the distance of the author’s perspective.

Travis Harris has been sent to his uncle’s Oklahoma horse ranch because his mother is afraid that he will eventually kill his stepfather, Stan. There are other reasons for getting Travis out of the violent urban world that so resembles earlier Hinton novels, and this past will catch up with him before he finishes the novel. Travis is like many Hinton characters: a loner, conscious of the impression he makes, and always trying to be “cool.”

He has considerable time in the first half of the novel to work on this image, for his uncle Ken’s horse ranch is isolated, and Travis is too young to drive. His uncle ignores Travis most of the time because he has his own problems trying to fight his wife, Teresa, for custody of their son Christopher. Travis spends time around the barn that Ken has leased to eighteen-year-old Casey Kencaide for her riding school, begins to work for her, and gets increasingly involved in the world of training and showing horses.

In true Hinton fashion, the action in the novel, and especially in its second half, is fast-paced: There are riding competitions, a thunderstorm during which the Star Runner of the title breaks free, and scenes in which Travis must deal with his old friend Joe from the city, who is involved in murder. Some of the thematic strands are quite strong, especially Travis’s developing relationships with Casey and Ken. Taming the Star Runner is certainly the most “adult” of Hinton’s five novels: Drugs and alcohol figure in realistic ways, the language is stronger, and the sexual theme is more mature.

Hinton’s primary strength, characterization, is weakened in Taming the Star Runner by her choice of a third-person point of view. While readers have no trouble accepting The Outsiders’ Ponyboy Curtis as a writer, it is more difficult to believe the same of Travis Harris, who, at fifteen, has written a novel that he sells in the course of Taming the Star Runner. He simply looks and sounds too much like the “sleazy punk” that both readers and other characters see from the outside. As his uncle says, “Sorry, kid, you haven’t given me the impression you could write a complex sentence.”

As Ms. Carmichael, his editor, remarks on first meeting Travis, “I couldn’t believe you had written that book. Your speaking style is so different from the way you write.” It is almost impossible for readers to accept a character who speaks as Travis does (“You can fix up the spelling, huh?” he asks Ms. Carmichael in that first meeting) as a novelist. If Travis Harris had narrated his own story, the plot manipulations and the melodramatic aspects of the novel would have been less obvious.

Summary

A popular young adult novelist, Hinton reuses many elements throughout her novels. Few parents appear in her novels, and the protagonists are often searching for substitutes, which they find in slightly older males; the focus is primarily on young men bonding with one another. Her plots are action-packed, and the central character usually narrates the story of his emerging self and conflicting loyalties. Both the strengths and weaknesses of the young adult genre are apparent in Hinton’s work. She has created a unique first-person voice that invites readers to share the story.

Bibliography

Chevalier, Tracy, ed. Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers. 3d ed. St. James Press, 1989.

Daly, Jay. Presenting S. E. Hinton. Updated ed. Twayne, 1989.

Drew, Bernard A. The One Hundred Most Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies. Libraries Unlimited, 1997.

Graham, Ginnie. "Forever an Outsider: Tulsa Author S.E. Hinton Looks Back 50 Years to Her First Book." Tulsa World, 5 May 2017, www.tulsaworld.com/scene/twm/forever-an-outsider-tulsa-author-s-e-hinton-looks-back/article‗ce9a7027-c470-50f3-82f0-3a993cd2f768.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2017.

Krischer, Hayley. "Why The Outsiders Lives On: A Teenage Novel Turns 50." The New York Times, 12 March 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/books/the-outsiders-s-e-hinton-book.html. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Paulson, Michael. "‘The Outsiders,’ a Broadway Adaptation of the Classic Novel, Wins the Tony for Best Musical." The New York Times, 16 June 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/theater/the-outsiders-best-musical-tony.html. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Zacharek, Stephanie. "Adult Themes." The New York Times Sunday Book Review, 13 May 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Zacharek-t.html. Accessed 3 July 2024.