Outsiders

The Outsiders is very much a product of its time and place. Elements of author S.E. Hinton’s real life in the mid-1960s can be found throughout the novel. Despite these specific characteristics, however, the story is written to be universal, a story for young adults everywhere.

GANG CULTURE

S.E. Hinton was fifteen years old when she began composing The Outsiders. However, by this young age, she had already learned enough about the world around her to become dissatisfied by what she saw. The main source of Hinton’s anger was the social-class divide among the students at her high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

On one side of this separation were the greasers, a gang of poor, lower-class young people from the east side of the city. This was the group of which Hinton considered herself a friend, though she never actually joined the gang formally. The opposing gang—referred to as the Socs, or Socials, in the novel—consisted of the wealthy students on Tulsa’s west side.

The central conflicts between the two groups were their social and economic classes. The greasers did not like the wealthy class because they had more money, while the wealthy did not like the greasers because they were poor. This disagreement is what had originally given rise to the gang mentality of the two groups. Poor students joined the greasers because the gang offered them understanding and the feeling of belonging; the same applied to the wealthy gang. Without even thinking that opposing gang members could ever understand one another, the gangs simply became enemies for life. It was the resulting tension and violence between the groups that Hinton attempted to capture in The Outsiders. The major difference between her real life and her novel, however, was that in the story, the greaser Ponyboy learns that he actually has much in common with the Soc girl Cherry. He only needed to allow himself to see her as a person rather than a Soc for this to happen.

The Outsiders: Historical Context. (2015). In Research in Context. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/RPDVYG258997395/MSIC?u=64_ufcc&sid=MSIC&xid=b5febf44