The Outsiders

I saw this morning that a book I truly loved as a pre-teen and, I suppose as a teen, is turning 50.  Wow.  The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton;   I read that book so often I could quote from it.  It was like no other book that was being marketed at the time and I really believe began the movement toward what we at the Library call Young Adult fiction.  Before that, books were about chaste maidens who found and married their first boyfriend, or maybe Nancy Drew.  These were not real people to me, but Ponyboy and his extended family were.  It was a book that made me want to be a writer and although I never really became one, the impact of that book stays with me.  I never did see the film made from the book and I suppose it's better that way.  I see Emilio Estevez played Two-bit, for instance.  Uh.. No offense,but Two Bit was a BLOND.  Ralph Machio as Johnny?  Not in my book.  I don't know how, or IF I would have cast them, but they are so vivid in my mind's eye, I am glad I never had to.

I wonder if teens are still reading the book, pressed into their hands by YA Librarians and parents who read the book as pre-teens and teens themselves?  I wonder if it has become as distant as  oh say Cathcer in the Rye, which is a "classic" but was a world I looked at "through a glass darkly"  Most YA books these days seem to be dystopian novels, with classic heroes or heroines who triumph over the situation they are in , much like Pony did, I suppose.   I really am tired of dystopian  novels.  The market is flooded with them.

Hinton wrote several other novels, which took place in the same neighborhood, but in my opinion never reached the passion of her first novel.  They were good, and I read them, but I did not re-read them dozens of times, as I did "The Outsiders"  That book holds a special place in my heart to this day.  Maybe I should re-read it....