In late October 2022, a big-time streaming star returned to town where all of it began for him. Ralph Macchio (most recently of “Cobra Kai” fame) was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to advertise his memoir, Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me. Hosted by Magic City Books, the live conversation within the Art Deco auditorium at Will Rogers High School featured one other popular culture icon: S.E. Hinton, the author whose teenage words would eternally be emblematic of young adult literature and whose most famous creation, The Outsiders, helped launch Macchio’s profession some 40 years earlier.
Prior to the event, Hinton was quietly going about her business, wandering the college’s halls absent-mindedly. “It was funny once I first got here into the constructing,” she said near the tip of a phone conversation last Halloween, per week and a half after her appearance with Macchio. “It’s been a protracted time, so I used to be sort of looking around … and a girl got here up and asked me, ‘Is that this your first time inside the college?’ I said, ‘No, not likely.’”
Greater than half a century ago, Susie Hinton (soon to be known by her gender-neutral pen name) was a student at Will Rogers, where she received a D in creative writing because class assignments were nowhere near as necessary to her as figuring out the plot and characters of The Outsiders. The story would come to define her life—regardless that nowadays she would slightly discuss absolutely anything else.
“I’m very uninterested in talking about [it],” says Hinton, now 74. “I don’t give speeches about it anymore. The considered entering into it yet another time is nearly paralyzing. You’re lucky. This will be the last interview on The Outsiders I’ll ever give. … Oh god, for once, I’d prefer to discuss Rumble Fish.”
While Rumble Fish is actually a nice book (and a terrific artsy film), it isn’t ranked thirty second in PBS’s “The Great American Read” poll of the top 100 English-language novels. Over its 56-year lifespan, The Outsiders has sold greater than 15 million copies, been published in greater than 30 languages and never gone out of print. The 1967 book is a foundational text within the young adult fiction canon, and the 1983 movie version (featuring Macchio as 16-year-old Johnny Cade) plays an outsized role in bringing tourists to Hinton’s lifelong home of Tulsa.
Hinton has nine books to her name, from children’s picture books to a horror novel to a set of intertwined short stories with adult characters to the coming-of-age works that built her literary profession. But not one of the others matches the continued cultural phenomenon that’s The Outsiders. It’s still an English class staple, taught (and occasionally banned) in middle and high schools across the country. The heartfelt movie adaptation has endurance, too. One in all its ramshackle filming locations, the Curtis brothers’ home, opened to the general public in 2019 because the Outsiders House Museum. And in 2021, the film underwent a 4K restoration that reinstated several beloved scenes from the book that didn’t make the unique cut.
Hinton could have said all she has to say about The Outsiders, however it stays an American classic, as relevant and beloved today as when it was published greater than five many years ago.
The origins of The Outsiders
Writing was an oasis from a rough upbringing Hinton rarely mentions but did describe to the Recent York Times in 2005. As creator Dinitia Smith wrote:
Ms. Hinton’s, father, Grady, was a door-to-door salesman, her mother, Lillian, an assembly-line employee. “My mother was physically and emotionally abusive,” Ms. Hinton said. “My father was a particularly cold man.”
It’s clearly a difficult admission to make, and one she has almost never made. The family attended a “fundamentalist, hellfire and brimstone” church, she said. “It turned me off religion.”
By the point she was 15, Hinton had already been churning out stories and poems for eight years. She wrote about what she knew: the continued battles between the haves and have-nots. In interviews through the years, Hinton described herself as an observer who grew up in North Tulsa “greaser” (slang for his or her greased-back hairstyles) territory but wasn’t beholden to anybody group. She was a tomboy who loved to read and yearned for honest teenage representation.
The genesis for The Outsiders was an incident during which a friend of Hinton’s was jumped by a carload of upper crust “Socs” (short for “Socials”) and beaten up for being a greaser. The escalation in the highschool cliques’ long-running rivalry fueled a creative burst that found the 16-year-old ending the primary draft in per week in 1966.
“What I used to be talking about was real,” Hinton says. “Books at the moment for teenagers were ‘Mary Jane goes to prom,’ but [they] didn’t include sneaking within the liquor, which was the important point. No person was writing about what was occurring in my highschool: the social and sophistication warfare.”
The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel told through the eyes of 14-year-old Ponyboy, the youngest of the three orphaned Curtis brothers. He’s a sensitive, Robert Frost-reciting soul whom Hinton once described as “the closest I’ve come to putting myself into a personality.” She aimed for realism, so the Socs and greasers smoke and drink, chase girls, and fight.
The book covers two weeks within the chaotic lives of Ponyboy and his best friend, Johnny. The plotting is concrete and comparatively sparse. Briefly order, Johnny kills a Soc who was attempting to drown Ponyboy, forcing the greaser friends to go on the run. In search of shelter in an abandoned church, the boys bond over cigarettes, sunsets and a craving for all times without socioeconomic unrest. Deciding to return home to the face the music, the outlaws turn out to be heroes, rescuing children from a burning constructing at great personal cost.
By the book’s end, three characters are dead, including Johnny and Dallas Winston, a rebellious East Coast transplant who goes down in a hail of police bullets. The violence is frank, as is the utter lack of nurturing adult figures. But what stands out is how much these tough, wrong-side-of-the-tracks teenagers look after each other. They share a depth of feeling and a fraternal love amongst young American men that hadn’t been displayed before Hinton put her experiences on paper.
“I’ve known many men in my life with an availability of compassion underneath that they’re afraid to indicate, which isn’t the case with Susie’s important characters,” says Rilla Askew, an creator who has written multiple novels set in her home state of Oklahoma, including the award-winning Fire in Beulah. “They’ve a tenderness and a decency about them, and it’s probably not a coincidence that it was a young female creator writing young male characters.”
Bringing the book to the general public
Not long after Hinton finished the manuscript, a friend of a friend advised her to send it to an agent named Marilyn Marlow. In response, Marlow wrote that the novel, originally called A Different Sunset (other rejected titles include The Switch-Blade Boys and The Leather Jackets), had “captured a certain spirit.” On Hinton’s last day of highschool in 1966, she learned Viking Press desired to publish her book. It got here out in 1967—Hinton’s freshman 12 months on the University of Tulsa—with “S.E.,” a gender-neutral name suggested by editor Velma Varner, on the duvet. Susie Eloise went out and purchased herself a Camaro.
Initially marketed as a dime-store paperback alongside books by pulp fiction author Mickey Spillane and the like, The Outsiders saw sluggish sales. Eventually, Viking caught on that the book was selling well where teachers were teaching it. Students and educators kept sales growing 12 months after 12 months through word of mouth, proclaiming that this was the book during which teenagers could see themselves.
“I feel The Outsiders is the most important of all my books because I wrote it at the fitting time in my life,” Hinton says. “By the point I wrote [the companion novel] That Was Then, This Is Now 4 years later, I could well remember what it was like being 16, however it’s still not similar to being 16. The Outsiders still resonates since it captures how teenagers feel—the combination of over-the-top emotions and idealism.”
After years of turning down offers from film studios, Hinton eventually sold the rights to The Outsiders to Francis Ford Coppola, an Oscar-winning director in need of a success. Soon, a big solid of fresh-faced young actors—a future “who’s who” of Hollywood—descended upon Tulsa. The movie would find a complete latest audience for Hinton’s debut novel and permanently alter town for the higher.
Bringing The Outsiders to the screen
In 1972, Jo Ellen Misakian was a parent with a latest job as a librarian on the Lone Star School in Fresno, California. She gave the book to her 13-year-old son, later telling the Recent York Times, “I had been so frustrated because the youngsters, the boys especially, didn’t read. By some means, The Outsiders caught on.” Misakian decided the book must be become a movie, so she contacted a Fresno Bee newspaper columnist who pointed her to Parade magazine’s movie editor. The editor, in turn, suggested contacting Hinton, who never responded.
Undeterred, Misakian wrote a letter to Coppola, who had recently produced The Black Stallion, a 1979 film adapted from the classic 1941 children’s book. She pitched him on The Outsiders with an enclosed paperback copy of the novel. Luckily for her, she mistakenly sent it to his Recent York City office, where he received almost no fan mail. Coppola handed the book off to producing partner Don Roos, who found the duvet illustration tacky and didn’t crack it for weeks, but eventually decided to provide it ten whole pages on a flight to see if it was any good. Roos read it cover to cover. Not long after, he flew to Tulsa to satisfy with Hinton. She wasn’t dazzled by Coppola’s cinematic pedigree, including movies like The Conversation, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, but as Roos explained when The Outsiders was released in March 1983, “she likes horses and felt The Black Stallion showed we had some affinity for young adult fiction.”
Coppola began filming in March 1982, secure in knowing The Outsiders could possibly be accomplished on the low-cost. He’d just blown $26 million, an enormous sum on the time, directing One From the Heart, a wayward musical that grossed a mere $636,796 on the box office and eventually bankrupted Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. The director found salvation within the Socs and the greasers, once saying, “I was once an amazing camp counselor, and the thought of being with half a dozen kids within the country and making a movie appeared like being a camp counselor again. It might be a breath of fresh air. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs.”
A large-net call that auditioned virtually every known Hollywood actor—a grueling process for all—produced a solid that’s, in hindsight, remarkable for its talent: Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, C. Thomas Howell, Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane. The nimble, stripped-down nature of shooting The Outsiders allowed for loads of backwards and forwards and loads of down time, making a real bond between the actors (or the greasers, anyway).
“It at all times does something if you take a bunch of individuals out of their very own element and stick them in a latest space. It forces them to show to one another for support,” says 56-year-old Howell, who played narrator Ponyboy Curtis. “On the weekends, we were playing football and basketball against the Socs. Coppola set it up in good nature, but subconsciously and psychologically, it was making a real competitive atmosphere and a dislike that wasn’t malicious by any means but definitely gave us a needed sense of rivalry.”
Photojournalist David Burnett saw the insular vibes firsthand after being asked to take publicity stills. Photos that weren’t used for promotion on the time were placed in a reject box and stashed away in a file cabinet. Some 35 years later, Burnett, now 76, heard concerning the opening of the Outsiders House Museum in Tulsa and offered to dig up and donate some snapshots. This, in turn, led to Burnett’s latest book, The Outsiders: Rare and Unseen, a set of long-shelved stills of the brilliant young solid. Burnett, whose illustrious profession has taken him all around the globe, shooting events just like the liftoff of Apollo 11, the Iranian Revolution and a Bob Marley tour, has fond recollections of his week in Oklahoma.
“It was a really low-key operation, so I just hung around, and each time an actor had a break, I’d ask them for five minutes to get a couple of shots,” he says. “No person knew who these guys were, in order that they were blissful to do it. They were all striving to do something interesting and career-building in ways they didn’t even realize.”
Burnett adds, “If The Outsiders were filmed today, they might be bulkier and in peak physical shape, but what the movie called for was a solid of thin, innocent-looking, young working-class boys. Tom Cruise didn’t even hide his gnarly teeth. [These were] different times. Being a part of it was an actual pleasure.”
Howell recalls Hinton’s presence as a vital a part of the method. She offered wardrobe and hairstyle suggestions, answered questions on Tulsa back within the day, gave personal insights, offered character motivations, explained the differences within the on a regular basis lives of Socs and greasers, and customarily acted because the group’s den mother. She still keeps in contact with most of her “guys,” which is why she acquiesced to Macchio’s overtures to affix him on stage last fall.
Though neither Hinton nor Coppola received a screenplay credit—it went solely to Kathleen Rowell, an early drafter of the project—the duo shaped the story and the scenes to maintain it authentic to the creator’s world.
As a reward for getting the book into Coppola’s hands, Misakian and her Fresno community got their very own early screening attended by solid members including Howell, Macchio and pop star-turned-Soc Leif Garrett. Misakian received a standing ovation, calling the experience a fairy tale—and her story didn’t end there.
In September 2021, the name “Jo Ellen Misakian” went up in lights on Tulsa’s Circle Cinema marquee, where the librarian appeared as a guest star at a special screening of the movie she made possible. Misakian also autographed the celebrity wall contained in the Curtis brothers’ home, a gathering place for Hinton devotees that was rebuilt by a former hip-hop luminary repaying The Outsiders for helping to save lots of his life.
Preserving The Outsiders’ legacy
Positioned in North Tulsa’s Crutchfield neighborhood at 731 North St. Louis Avenue, the Nineteen Twenties Craftsman bungalow looks kind of similar to it did when Coppola used it because the home of Darry, Sodapop and Ponyboy Curtis. It’s a straightforward one-story dwelling, a cream-and-white wood abode featuring a concrete porch dotted with midcentury metal porch furniture to ride out those steamy Oklahoma nights. A rusty chain-link fence surrounds the modest property, where the 1949 Plymouth Special De Luxe driven by Two-Bit Matthews (played by Estevez) rests on the lawn and personalized donation bricks encourage guests to “stay gold.”
In 2009, Danny Boy O’Connor, whose defunct hip-hop group House of Pain hit it big with “Jump Around” in 1992, was touring in Tulsa when inspiration struck. He paid a cabbie $100 to drive him around in the hunt for Outsiders filming locations. Discovering that the Curtis brothers’ house still existed led him to found the Delta Bravo Urban Exploration Team (“Delta Bravo” sounded less corny than “Danny Boy,” he thought), a bunch of online friends who make pilgrimages to popular culture and true crime sites to photograph them for posterity. It was a technique to reconnect together with his life, which had spiraled into the abyss after House of Pain broke up within the mid-Nineties.
O’Connor was born right into a rough Brooklyn life. His father was out and in of prison and would eventually die drunk on the road, he says. After remarrying, his mother moved her son to Los Angeles for a fresh start, but two years later, his alcoholic stepfather died of cirrhosis of the liver. It was the style of upbringing that might culminate within the hip-hop artist burning through tens of millions of dollars on alcohol and medicines.
The young O’Connor found solace in The Outsiders’ story of orphans and brotherly sensitivity. Unable to afford the home when he first encountered it, he sprang into motion and purchased it when he saw it go up on the market in 2015.
“If I didn’t save the [house], I knew I used to be going to be miserable for the remainder of my life,” says O’Connor. The property was in terrible condition, he recalls, likening its look to the house of the serial killer in David Fincher’s Se7en. He didn’t have the $150,000 it might take to show it right into a livable home; despite the undeniable fact that his only memorabilia from the film was a poster, he decided to show it right into a museum. Preserving the Curtis brothers’ home became his reason for being, a likelihood to provide back and be of service in his latest surroundings. Before he undertook the project, nevertheless, he needed to attach with Hinton.
“Danny called and asked if we could meet up. I didn’t know anything about his musical profession, and even what he looked like, but I knew by the tip of lunch that we were going to find yourself close friends,” Hinton says. “He asked if I had any interest in buying the home. I said, ‘God no, I can barely sustain with my very own house,’ but I told him to go ahead if he desired to.”
Hinton gave greater than her blessing. She made the primary large donation, $10,000, and provided O’Connor with a brown leather jacket worn by each Dillon and Howell within the film. O’Connor’s original estimate was that it might take six months to get the museum up and running. It took greater than three years and $175,000, but for all involved, it was a labor of affection.
Today, the 1,400-square-foot interior is full of furniture, memorabilia, paintings, foreign editions, Burnett’s photographs, multiple switchblades, wardrobe pieces like Estevez’s sleeveless Mickey Mouse shirt (and a faux chocolate cake as well), and Ponyboy’s desk. An obscure period detail honors one other famed Oklahoman: a 1958 record album of Mickey Mantle’s favorite hits (fortunately not sung by the Yankee slugger).
In August 2019, the Outsiders House Museum officially opened its doors, welcoming school groups in the course of the week and most of the people on the weekends. O’Connor estimates that some 20,000 people visited in 2022—a large uptick from the previous pandemic-plagued years. Private tours allow docents like Donnie Wealthy to clarify their personal connections to the book. As a youngster who didn’t do the reading for sophistication, Wealthy says he knocked on Hinton’s door in an unsuccessful try and secure her help with a book report on what he calls the “Oklahoma Bible.” The museum also hosts concert events, movie screenings and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. True Curtis brother diehards may even crash across the road on the Greaser Hideout Airbnb or, for the complete experience, within the still-vacant lot where Macchio’s Johnny slept under a pile of newspapers.
“Danny has done an amazing job with the Outsiders House,” says Hinton. “People come from all around the United States, and even the world. He said teenage girls have walked in and burst into tears. It floors me.”
For O’Connor, the museum has been a life-changing experience, offering a way of direction in addition to a literal place to live. He relocated from Los Angeles to be the full-time keeper of The Outsiders’ flame. He was integral within the publishing of Burnett’s photo book and recently signed a contract with Penguin to write down the film’s oral history. Nearly everyone from The Outsiders, extras and massive stars alike, have dropped by the museum (excluding Cruise, at the least to date). So have fanboys like musician Jack White, Leonardo DiCaprio (while filming Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon) and the members of Green Day. O’Connor is such a fixture around Tulsa that Mayor G.T. Bynum gave him a key to town.
Hinton’s life today
Other than a couple of years spent in Northern California, Hinton never left Tulsa. She still lives in the home where she and her husband, David Inhofe, a software engineer by trade, raised their son, Nick Inhofe, who now works as an audio engineer within the movie business. She’s right down to earth and never wild about discussing herself (Hinton makes it abundantly clear there’ll “never be a memoir”), but she also chats with fans on Twitter and within the neighborhood writ large. Tulsa provided all she ever needed, and she or he’s comfortably woven into the material of the community, walking unknown through the halls of her alma mater before bringing the local house down.
“I still get recognized sometimes on the food market. It’s not a J.D. Salinger situation. I haven’t got the temperament for that or the talent to deserve it,” says Hinton, adding dryly, “You may not realize it from reading my books, but my humorousness is a robust a part of my personality.”
Teresa Miller can attest to Hinton’s fun-loving, grounded personality, in addition to her central role within the local literary scene. In 1994, Miller founded the Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa. She spent twenty years running it and hosting the PBS television show “Writing Out Loud.” Along the best way, she and Hinton became skilled colleagues and shut friends—but before they even met, Miller, 70, was thrilled that someone had upended the usual perception of who Oklahomans are.
Miller explains, “I come from just a little Cherokee community called Tahlequah and started working in Tulsa before moving here many years ago, so I’ve lived each a rural and concrete life. Growing up, Oklahoma was known for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and The Grapes of Wrath, each of which my father hated due to the Okie stereotypes.”
She adds, “The Outsiders modified that. It took the Oklahoma story to a special level. [Hinton] showed Tulsa as an everyday city with regular city problems and handled it in a singular but universal way. She wrote a [novel about] Oklahoma that had nothing to do with singing cowboys or the Joads. It didn’t eliminate the stereotypes … but The Outsiders and Susie’s subsequent books modified how the skin world viewed us and even how we viewed ourselves.”
It actually modified how Okie transplant O’Connor sees himself. It’s turn out to be his life’s work—and he’s just getting began. Renovations are underway at the long-lasting DX gas station featured within the film, and he’s aiming to boost enough money to revive other abandoned locales just like the Rexall Drug Store. He also has designs on something greater for his favorite creator.
“I would like to open, for lack of a greater name, the S.E. Hinton Museum, which she absolutely hates,” says O’Connor. (Hinton replies, “I’ll consider it once I see it.”)
The previous hip-hop star adds, “I used to be lost after House of Pain. [Hinton’s] sensible work gave me purpose. Bringing her legacy to the people is what I’m meant to do.”
If O’Connor’s vision ever involves fruition, it can honor Hinton’s full literary profession, not only the book that put her on the map. At the tip of the day, though, the creator understands the importance of The Outsiders.
“I’m known best for the very first thing I’ve written, however it’s higher than not being known in any respect,” she says. “I just don’t wish to discuss it anymore.”
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