Young Adult Fiction Pioneer S.E. Hinton on Fifty Years of The Outsiders

One afternoon in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1960s, a 15-year-old student at Will Rogers High School named Susan Hinton—her close friends called her Suzie—witnessed a friend being attacked by a gang of boys on his way home from school.

That was how things were in Suzie’s rough, working-class neighborhood, where rival social groups stalked the streets. “Going to the prom, the big suspense was who got the liquor and how they got it in, and who got killed in the parking lot,” she told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek recently. It was a tense, troubled existence not reflected in the books being written for and about teenagers of the period. “It was all, ‘Mary Jane goes to the prom with the quiet boy next door instead of the football hero, but she had a good time anyway.’ Or, ‘Tommy hits a home run, and wasn’t that fun?’”

A bookish child, Suzie had already devoured the likes of Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights and The Stranger by Albert Camus. She herself had started writing in the third grade. Realizing her handwriting was illegible, she taught herself to type in the sixth grade. “God, you had to have strong fingers.”

That night after the attack, Suzie fed a sheet of paper into her late father’s old Underwood typewriter and began typing. “I came home and began what I thought was going to be a short short story about a kid who was beaten up on his way home from the movies.” Beyond writing about what she’d seen that afternoon, Suzie tried to capture the simmering adolescent rage and frustration that coursed through her hometown. There was a lot to get down. “I just wrote it, and kept writing, and kept writing, and kept writing. When I finished, it was about 40 pages long, single-space typed.”

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton—Suzie’s name was altered so as not to draw attention to her gender—was published a couple of years later, in 1967. In the way it treated adolescent concerns with adult seriousness, the book has been credited with the birth of a whole literary genre: Young Adult Fiction.

And now, more than a half-century later, it’s a Broadway musical.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Hinton opened up about the newest adaptation of The Outsiders, being “mom” to the cast of the Francis Ford Coppola movie and much more.

Watch the video of the full interview below.