Adapted into an award-winning film by Francis Ford Coppola & starring Patrick Swayze Rob Lowe & Tom Cruise SE Hinton's The Outsiders is a young adult novel of enduring power This Penguin Modern Classics edition is published with an introduction by Jodi Picoult author of My Sister's Keeper The Greasers & the rich-kid Socs are at war on the Tulsa streets Ponyboy a fourteen-year-old brawler chainsmoker & dreamer is a fiercely loyal greaser But a single murderous catastrophe is to wrench him from his old life & overturn everything he thinks he knows The Outsiders was an audacious debut written when SE Hinton was only seventeen laying bare the hopes & terrors between teenage bravado in a world of drive-ins drag races & switchblades It confronted America with a new breed of anti-hero from the wrong side of the class divide & became a bestselling classic of youthful rebellion Susan Eloise Hinton (b 1950) wrote her first book The Outsiders in 1967 when she was seventeen years old Hinton is also the author of That Was When This Is Now (1971) adapted into a film starring Emilio Estevez & Morgan Freeman; Rumble Fish (1975) also adapted into a film by Francis Ford Coppola starring Mickey Rourke Nicholas Cage & Dennis Hopper; Tex (1979); Taming the Star Runner (1988) & many others Hinton lives in Oklahoma If you enjoyed The Outsiders you might like Jack Kerouac's On the Road also available in Penguin Modern Classics' Gritty emotional & very authentic' Jodi Picoult' The Outsiders is a teenage epic' Francis Ford Coppola