Why I Still Cry Over a Book Written by a Teenager

Greasers, Socs, and a rumble nobody wins

Ponyboy Curtis is fourteen, orphaned, raised by his older brothers Darry and Sodapop, and he’s a Greaser, which in this book’s Tulsa means poor, East Side, leather jacket, and permanently on guard against the Socs (the rich West Side kids who jump Greasers for sport, basically). The setup is simple almost to the point of being a fable: two tribes, one town, a war nobody remembers starting. Ponyboy gets jumped in the opening pages walking home from the movies alone, which should tell you everything about how safe anyone is in this world.

Then there’s a scene at a drive-in where Ponyboy and his friend Johnny meet Cherry Valance, a Soc girl, and for about twenty pages the book lets you believe maybe the tribal lines aren’t as solid as they look. That hope gets stomped out fast. There’s a fight in a park, a death, a act of self-defense that turns into a manhunt, and Ponyboy and Johnny end up hiding out in an abandoned church miles from home, cutting their hair, reading Gone with the Wind aloud to each other like that’s a normal thing two terrified teenage fugitives do. (It kind of works. Don’t ask me why.)

I won’t spoil what happens at that church, or after, because if you don’t already know, you deserve to feel it cold the way I did. But I’ll say the book doesn’t let anyone off easy, and it doesn’t pretend violence is cool even while it’s clearly a little bit thrilled by its own toughness.

Why it still gets me, and where it genuinely creaks

Look, the prose is not good in the way we usually mean “good.” Hinton was a teenager. The dialogue is stiff in places, the metaphors are sometimes laid on with a trowel (that Robert Frost poem gets recited so on-the-nose it borders on a school assembly), and every single Greaser boy is described as having “movie star” good looks at least once, which after the fourth repetition starts to feel less like a stylistic choice and more like something nobody caught in editing.

And yet.

The reason this book has never left print since 1967 isn’t despite the roughness, it’s almost because of it. Ponyboy’s voice sounds like an actual fourteen-year-old boy trying to sound tougher than he is, which is exactly what a fourteen-year-old boy trying to sound tough actually sounds like. There’s a rawness here that a more polished adult writer would have sanded off without meaning to. When Johnny says the line about staying gold, when Dally loses it at the hospital, when Ponyboy just cannot process what’s happened to his friends and the book lets him not process it for pages, that’s not craft in the technical sense. That’s a kid writer who felt something so hard she couldn’t help but put it on the page honestly.

I’ll admit I question this rating every time I revisit it, because objectively the sentence-level writing wouldn’t survive a modern MFA workshop, and there’s a real argument this book is more important historically (it more or less created contemporary YA fiction, gangs and all) than it is good as a standalone novel today. But then I get to the part where Johnny’s in the hospital and I still feel my throat go tight, and I think, fine, it’s not perfect. It’s just true.

The tangent I can’t resist: this book got Hinton’s own hometown teachers so rattled by its honesty about class and violence that some school libraries banned it for years, which is objectively hilarious given how tame it reads next to what teenagers watch on their phones at recess now. Different era, different nerves.

If you want your own copy to underline in gel pen like I did at fourteen, it’s easy enough to find.

Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.

About S.E. Hinton

Susan Eloise Hinton wrote this book as a teenager in Tulsa, Oklahoma, partly because she was sick of reading novels where nothing that happened to real working-class kids ever showed up on the page. Her publisher had her use initials instead of “Susan” so male reviewers wouldn’t dismiss a gang novel written by a girl, which tells you plenty about 1967 and, honestly, still stings a little. She kept writing after this (Rumble Fish, That Was Then, This Is Now) but never quite escaped being the woman who wrote The Outsiders in her teens, which must be its own strange kind of fame, half honor and half cage.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Rumble Fish by S.E. Hinton, for more Tulsa, more brothers, more doomed toughness, in a much shorter and stranger package
• That Was Then, This Is Now by S.E. Hinton, if you want the friendship-under-pressure ache without the gang-war scale
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles, for the same quiet devastation of boyhood friendship colliding with forces bigger than either boy
• Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, if you want to trace the line from Hinton’s honesty straight to modern YA’s willingness to sit in real teenage pain

For your book club

1. Does the class divide between Greasers and Socs feel dated to you, or does it map onto something you still recognize now?
2. Ponyboy narrates the whole book in first person as a kind of writing assignment. Does knowing that change how you read his voice?
3. Is Dally a tragic figure or does the book let him off too easy for how genuinely cruel he is early on?
4. The book insists Socs have their own kind of pain too, mostly through Cherry. Did you buy that, or did it feel like a hedge?
5. Would this book survive being published today with a debut sixteen-year-old author and zero brand name behind it?