i think the outsiders is a good book who agrees?

Answer 1

Yep, a very good book for a good long time.

The Outsiders (1967) is approaching the fortieth anniversary of its printing, and it's still the kind of good reading that it was when it first appeared.. But maybe even more important, it opened the way for a whole new kind of books for young readers.

Once a long time ago, there were children’s books for children and adult books for adults, but for kids in between who were beyond kiddie lit and not interested yet in literary classics or serious modern fiction--well, there wasn’t much: mostly books like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

But in 1933, Longmans published a “junior novel,” addressed especially to teenagers. It was by Rose Wilder Lane (the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame), and it was called Let the Hurricane Roar (the movie and later editions were called Young Pioneers). Pretty soon there were a lot of "junior novels," but they didn’t deal much with real-live modern teenagers.

Then in 1942, a book called Seventeeth Summer by Maureen Daly came out. Her college English instructor let her write it instead of themes in her freshman composition class, and it told about her own experience (as a seventeen-year-old) of “first love,” what adults would have called infatuation. Libraries sometimes had as many as forty or fifty copies, I am told, and there were lines of young women waiting. It was a tame book, but realistic. Soon John Tunis was wrting sports stories about real high-school and college-age athletes; Robert Heinlein wrote scifi books like Farmer in the Sky for teenage readers; and Henry Gregor Felsen wrote Hot Rod and other books about boys and cars and then eventually Two on the Town, about a teenage couple who become pregnant and then marry. But all these books were fairly tame compared to actual adolescent experience and they dealt pretty much with middle-class families and values.

Then in 1952 J. D. Salinger came out with an adult book that was soon adopted by teenagers as their own: Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield talked like a real teenager and experienced the tension that most young people could identify with. It stood on its own. It was passed around in paperback from friend to friend, censored in schools, read over and over again, but there was nothing else quite like it.

Until 1967. Then another book came out by another seventeen-year-old girl, Susie Hinton, writing about people she knew and cared about. The Greasers would have been described by middle-class American parents, teachers, and librarians, and by Socs, as from the “other side of the tracks.” But, as Susie knew, they were really the kids next door, down the street, in every city, in every school, in just about every classroom. Ponyboy, Dallas, Darry, Two-Bit, Sodapop, and Cherry were very real, and they spoke for themselves. Publishers decided to list the author as S. E. Hinton, so boys would not pass it by as a book written by a woman.

I once taught a young man, a veteran of the Vietnam War, who told me he had been turned on to reading by The Outsiders. He had even decided, after he returned from Nam, to become an English teacher. He was shocked when he learned that S. E. Hinton was actually Susan Hinton! He swore it just couldn’t be so. No girl could have written that realistically about guys. Hmmm.

Suddenly, The Outsiders cut a path for a whole new kind of books—for young readers, about the real experiences of being young, from young people’s point of view. Publishers didn’t want to call them “junior novels” any more, or adolescent novels, because that seemed condescending, so they came up with the phrase, “the young adult novel.”

Within the next decade or so there were M. E. Kerr (pseudonym for Maryjane Meaker) with Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack and many others; Paul Zindel (a high-school science teacher) with The Pigman and the Broadway play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds; Robert Cormier with titles like The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, After the First Death, and others. They were joined by many more, including my favorites Chris Crutcher (a high-school counselor) who came out with books like Running Loose, Stotan!, Athletic Shorts, and The Crazy Horse Electric Game; and Lia Francesca Block, whose Weetzie Bat books capture the experience of “young adult” women coming of age in Los Angeles.

All this began with the huge popularity of Susie Hinton and The Outsiders.

So, yes indeed, it’s a good book, but it also helped create a new kind of book and opened the way for a raft of other good writers—to write for young readers, about the experience of being young, from real young people’s point of view. Ponyboy lives on!

Sorry to go on and on. But this is a story that I like to tell.

Answer 2

I haven't read it in many years, but I agree it was a really good book.

Answer 3

I think one of the greatest things about that book is that it is absolutely timeless. You can take the hardships those guys faced and imagine kids going through them today. I have a friend who teaches that book to her 7th and 8th grade students because it's a way to get them to open up.

Answer 4

I loved the book and the movie.

Answer 5

Totally agree - loved it.

After the Outsiders, I think I read everything by that author.

Answer 6

I read the book when I was in high school, it was an excellent book.

Answer 7

i loved that book it was amazing i loved it! i keep wishing i could meet pony and soda and darry than i remember the book is fiction! hehe

Answer 8

i agree 100%...and the movie was great!!