Analysis Of The Outsiders By S. E. Hinton

S.E. Hinton is known for astounding everyone with her book The Outsiders which she wrote when she was 15 years old and was still in high school. Michael Malone’s critical essay, tough puppies, gives the reader a good understanding of what happened in Hinton’s life which helped her to become one of the most successful authors for teenagers. In the article, it explains how Hinton’s personal life and ability to relate it to her books helped her to revolutionize modern teenage literature. Malone provides a view into Hinton’s life and what her inspiration might have been behind her best-selling book “The Outsiders”. The article explains that by showing how the teenage life really was in that setting, Hinton founded a new path towards books which

She uses her personal experience from living in a time of gang violence and social discrimination to reflect on the issue in her book. The article states “Tim Hunter, the director of Tex, says he was drawn to Hinton’s work because of the way she weaves social problems into the fabric of the story”(Malone). This quote from the article shows how Hinton is admired because of her ability to relate the current issues of the public into her books. In Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, she outlines many different themes such as social discrimination and violence amongst gangs during that time. Her ability to do this was because she grew up as a high school student in that time period where she experienced these problems first hand. Because of this new found way of writing, she grew immensely popular among teenagers and even adults who were drawn in because of the realistic portrayal of current

Hinton’s novels is her use of mainly male characters. In The Outsiders there are little to no female figures and when there is they only hang around their boyfriends who they receive their social status from. Hinton addresses this observation in an interview which is quoted in Malones article. She says “ When I was growing up, most of my close friends were boys”(Malone). This quote explains why most of Hinton’s books are written in a boy’s point of view and also where she received her tom-boy character. She also addresses the other observation, that there aren't very many females in the book, by saying “It was such a passive society. Girls got their status from their boy-friends. They weren't interested in doing anything on their own.”(Malone). This quote shows that there aren’t many females in her book because most of the girls didn’t want to do things on their own and just stuck around their boyfriends who gave them their social status. This shows how being friends with mainly boys and growing up in a time where girls didn’t want to do things on their own has affected Hinton’s writing in The