Recommended Reading: The Outsiders

When I started teaching, back in 1997, the first novel I ever taught to any of my classes was this one: THE OUTSIDERS by S. E. Hinton. The (very difficult and challenging) Year 9 class to whom I taught it fell in love with it straight away, and we were all wrapped up in Hinton's world until the very last page.

The author was just 16 YEARS OLD when she wrote the book, about a traumatic time in the life of a recently orphaned fourteen-year-old boy named Ponyboy Michael Curtis. Hinton explores the themes of class conflict, brotherly love, friendship, and coming of age by following two rival gangs, the greasers and the Socs, who are separated by social-economic status.

So, in short, it is a novel about teenage romance and gang warfare - something for all of you, really...

And if you like the book, the eminent film director, Francis Ford Coppola, made a movie of the book in 1983, starring a very young Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez, and an even younger Sofia Coppola (the director's daughter, and now a film director in her own right, with The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette to her name).

And the tagline for the movie? They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.

If you read it and want to study it further, click here for an online study guide. In the meantime, here is an extract:

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home. I was wishing I looked like Paul Newman -he looks tough and I don't-but I guess my own looks aren't so bad. I have light-brown, almost-red hair and greenish-gray eyes. I wish they were more gray, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have. My hair is longer than a lot of boys wear theirs, squared off in back and long at the front and sides, but I am a greaser and most of my neighborhood rarely bothers to get a haircut. Besides, I look better with long hair.

I had a long walk home and no company, but I usually lone it anyway, for no reason except that I like to watch movies undisturbed so I can get into them and live them with the actors. When I see a movie with someone it's kind of uncomfortable, like having someone read your book over your shoulder. I'm different that way. I mean, my second-oldest brother, Soda, who is sixteen-going-on-seventeen, never cracks a book at all, and my oldest brother, Darrel, who we call Darry, works too long and hard to be interested in a story or drawing a picture, so I'm not like them. And nobody in our gang digs movies and books the way I do. For a while there, I thought I was the only person in the world that did. So I loned it.

Soda tries to understand, at least, which is more than Darry does. But then, Soda is different from anybody; he understands everything, almost. Like he's never hollering at me all the time the way Darry is, or treating me as if I was six instead of fourteen. I love Soda more than I've ever loved anyone, even Mom and Dad. He's always happy-go-lucky and grinning, while Darry's hard and firm and rarely grins at all But then, Darry's gone through a lot in his twenty years, grown up too fast. Sodapop'll never grow up at all. I don't know which way's the best. I'll find out one of these days.