It may be odd to think of The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton's landmark young-adult novel about the rough side of teenage life, as being over the hill. But having reached its 40th year of publication, that's finally become the case. Of course, great books don't age the way people do and, according to Hinton, certain authors don't either.
"It's amazing to realize that your first novel is older than you are," she deadpanned to an audience of about 300 educators and literacy experts at the International Reading Association's annual meeting, which took place in Toronto earlier this summer. Later, she changed her story: "Well, now that the book is 40 years old, I think I'll come clean and tell you that I wrote it when I was 6."
The amazing thing is, she's not exaggerating by that much. Hinton was a mere 15 when she started writing from the point of view of 14-year-old Ponyboy, a greaser whose gang of blue-collar friends are in conflict with the posh kids from the East Side, known as the Socials (he calls them Socs, for short).
Three years later, when the book was published, it wasn't an immediate bestseller and Hinton says she didn't become a star author right away, either. The book dealt with serious themes of violence, abuse and alienation that hadn't been yet broached in teen fiction, so parents had to come around to it slowly. They eventually did though, and after Francis Ford Coppola made a film of the book in 1983, which starred a gang of budding actors that included Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe and Ralph Macchio, The Outsiders and Hinton were forever ingrained into the minds of people worldwide.
Relaxing over a glass of white wine after her speech, Hinton says that even now - 40 years down the road - she doesn't feel famous.
"I don't get up in the morning and go, 'Whoa, I'm S.E. Hinton!' I get up and go, 'Whoa, I need to clean the cat box.' "
Yet the book has now sold more than 13.4 million copies, is requisite reading in schools worldwide and Hinton receives far more fan mail than she can respond to. Truth be told, she doesn't always feel deserving of it.
"A lot of kids think, 'Reading this book blew my mind, if I could just get a hold of her personally, think what would happen.' And I'm thinking, 'You don't need to get a hold of me personally. You'd be badly disappointed. I'm a middle-aged woman just doing my laundry.' It's in the book. Anything I've got to give to the public, it's in the book."
The draw of the book is something she does understand. "They identify with the feeling that they're an outsider, even sometimes in their own group. Like Ponyboy - nobody in his group read books or liked to go to movies like he did."
According to Hinton, she was driven to write the story out of anger at seeing kids in her school marginalized. Two young boys die in The Outsiders, and though it never came to that in her own life, she feared it would. "I could see if [the conflicts]escalated much further, then somebody was going to end up getting killed, accidentally or whatever."
The tragic parts of The Outsiders have turned out to be sadly prophetic in light of the rise of school shootings over the past decade and the book is perhaps more relevant now than ever. Hinton, whose sister has schizophrenia, says she thinks the Virginia Tech shooting had more to do with the difficulty of getting help for mentally ill individuals than with bullying, but Columbine is a different story.
"There seems to be enough evidence that those guys were picked on and excluded until they started having revenge fantasies," Hinton says. "When that happened, I told my own son, 'Look, I know you would never be involved in something like this, but what I don't ever want to think is that you'd be involved in driving somebody to commit that kind of act either.' "
But again, Hinton stresses that although she is often asked to act as the teen expert, she is not one. "Believe me, when my kid hit 14, I was as horrified as anybody. He was sweet, he was funny, we all got along great, and then all the sudden, he was like, 'Don't ask me how my day was. It was horrible. It was horrible yesterday! It'll be horrible tomorrow!' "
Hinton says she blamed growing up poor for her anger as a child until she saw her own son go through the same thing. "Now, I realize it's just hormonal."
While Penguin's 40th-anniversary edition of The Outsiders, to be released next month, will create the most buzz for Hinton this year, she's personally more excited about her new, and 10th, book, Tim's Stories, which she says is her "best book yet." I'm sure it is, but she can't escape the burning question from all 13.4 million (and more) of her fans: When will she write the sequel to The Outsiders?
"I could never be Ponyboy again," she says. "To me, the book is over, and the very fact that so many kids don't want it to be over with is a sign that I ended it in the right place." And if she suddenly needed a huge amount of cash? "I still have my original manuscript, which might make me a pretty good price on eBay. It's typed up and it's got chocolate icing on it. That's my little nest egg."
That's unlikely to happen anyway. Selling more copies last year than ever, it appears The Outsiders is going to, as the moral of the book goes, "stay gold."