Bury Your Head

Johnny Cade

The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel by S.E. Hinton published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton started writing the novel when she was 15 and wrote the bulk of it when she was 16 and a junior in high school. Hinton was 18 when the book was published. The book details the conflict between two rival gangs divided by their socioeconomic status: the working-class "Greasers" and the upper-class "Socs" (pronounced —short for Socials). The story is told in first-person perspective by teenage protagonist Ponyboy Curtis. The story in the book takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1965, but this is never explicitly stated in the book. A film adaptation was produced in 1983 by Francis Ford Coppola, and a short-lived television series appeared in 1990, picking up where the … more »