S.E Hinton

[Barkwood]

I just finished reading the Outsiders, by S.E Hinton and That Was Then... This Is Now, also by S.E Hinton.

They were both phenomenal books with extremely depressing factors, I am now going to read Rumble Fish.

These three, The Outisders, That Was Then... This Is Now and Rumble Fish are known as the S.E Hinton trio, the three books she was most famous for.

Have you read any of them? All of them?Two of them? One Of Them? None?

What do you think of S.E Hinton and all of her books in general?

Discuss.

[Jozanny]

I did The Outsiders over 20 years ago in highschool. Forget what grade, but my sense is Hinton has come and gone. I rarely see her work discussed online, which is not to say she wasn't a very good YA novelist in my day, but that was back then. She is my age now, and if she has staying power, then I yield to the enlightened.

My instructors noted she was a prodigy. I don't doubt it, but suspect it was of the flash fire kind.

[papayahed]

I haven't read the books in a while but I remember liking them very much. The Outsiders movie was on recently, I can never pass it up.

[book_jones]

I didn't read it until I had to teach it. I did find it quite enjoyable though, and my students really responded to it. Some of them actually wished that the book had been longer. That's like a dream come true in a junior high English class!

[JBI]

From my reading of The Outsiders:

Too basic and too general - her characters are obscure, and unrealistic, yet are supposed to be. She has interesting ideas, but really is quite juvenile (though we must admit she wrote the book at quite the young age).

Decent for YA stuff, but doesn't really transcend, and seems to have aged poorly, as Jozanny has pointed out.

[Jozanny]

From my reading of The Outsiders:
Decent for YA stuff, but doesn't really transcend, and seems to have aged poorly, as Jozanny has pointed out.

Part of the problem is that the American white trash angst has become quaint, and while I do not remember much of the plot from The Outsiders, I don't need to to know youth trauma is much more brutal in the US than the literature which used to reflect it, or the literature we were supposed to hold up to the mirror to reflect it, so much so that novels like A Separate Peace, Catcher In The Rye, or even They Call It Sleep, which is a Jewish assilimation novel--a one time stroke of great writing--these, along with anything Hinton did, are almost nostalgia pieces, in comparison to what AIDS and urban drug culture and its new cross-pollenated gangs have given us.

I know too much about this violence on a conceptual level to post about it as personal experience, but all one has to do is invoke the famous Virginia Tech shooter, from last year, to know we don't really have writers who are coping with this, as literary artists. Burgess comes closest to getting at the blithe indifference of young killers with A Clockwork Orange (although I mentioned in the Burgess thread that the book is so heavily schematic that this in itself is a major detraction). I forgot to add this earlier--but he isn't an American handling what is, as far as I know, a distinct American pathology. I know the novelist George Harrar, but even his YA material doesn't come close to new century urban nihilism, although I'd argue his characters have a better authenticity than Pony Boy and company. For what is was when she wrote it, The Outsiders hints at a promising talent, but I agree with JBI, Hinton is a writer who got caught in a time warp, even if that warp is better than nothing.