It
wasn't until at least a few years after I read The
Outsiders as a high school
assignment that I realized its author S.E. Hinton was female. It
didn't matter to me when I found out, but as her editor suggested, it
may have put me off of the book before I ever gave it a try had I known.
Seems reasonable to suspect that as a teenage boy in the late 1970s I
may have fallen for the unconscious (to me) trope that “girls can't
write about things I care about.”
I'm
glad I didn't know. Such provinciality may have shut me out of a
still-memorable read. I can't say I remember it as great literature,
but I did really like it and for once, a book didn't automatically
suck just because I had to read it for class. Pretty heady stuff for a
public school district in the southwestern Ohio of my era. My
enjoyment pretty much continued apace with Hinton's follow-up novels,
That Was Then, This Is Now
and Rumble Fish.
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