Original 1967 cover of The Outsiders hardcover release.

The first edition to S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders was released on April 24, 1967. During the time before it was released was when the genre of young adult literature began to sell. However, to Hinton, many of these stories were not realistic. They glorified what being a teenager for their time was liked and avoided showing the harder parts of life for the adolescent. So Hinton wrote her book to show these struggles of violence, isolation, and human interactions. She crafted a story that she saw the most true to the life of teenagers. And this book became a staple book used in schools after it was written, just not because of their realism of adolescence of their day and age.

The biggest take away from the book for many people, including those that added it to school reading lists, was the commentary to be made involving society class status and conflict. In the story are two gangs of the same town, the Greasers and the Socs. The Socs are of the better side of the neighborhood, being richer and having nice things such as cars and better education, while the Greasers don’t have that same luxury. The narrator of The Outsiders, a boy by the name of Ponyboy Curtis, lives with and as the Greasers, and numerous times do the two gangs and their members clash. Teachers and adults have come to view this as a means of addressing these class problems, and found it easy to use as a catalyst seeing as there is no solution offered or demanded to solve these, as they are seen as, problems in society.  It leaves the teachers with an open discussion and assignment for their classes to make their own commentary on the subject without being told they are wrong for thinking one way over another.

The main cast of boys in the film.

From left to right, top to bottom: Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Emilio Esteves, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise.

Author S.E. Hinton and actor Matt Dillon during a hospital scene in The Outsiders.

This film came about thanks to a school. Before, there was no intention from movie studios to film and release a movie adaptation of The Outsiders. It took school students and their librarian from The Lone Star School in Fresno, California to send a letter to Coppola and his production company, Zoetrope, to convince them to make the film. S.E. Hinton herself had already turned down offers from other studios wishing to buy the rights to the book to make it a film, but she denied to do so, not believing they could do it enough justice. After an interview between author Hinton and director Coppola, the two agreed to work with each other and go on to produce the film. Hinton had enough trust in Zoetrope after learning of The Black Stallion, another book-to-film adaptation done by the film company, and seeing how true they kept to the novel when making the film.

Filming was, in itself, an unusual experience for many of the at-the-time teenage actors, but one that worked out well in the end. Auditions didn’t happen one on one, but instead with around 30 people in a room cycling through different characters until Coppola could find which one they suited best. When actors for both gangs in the film, the Greasers and the Socs, had been cast, Coppola had them separated with other members of the gang to create an on set feud between the two gangs. This did lead to a real feud between actor Matt Dillon, who plays the character Dallas, and Diane Lane, who plays Cherry, who at the beginning of the film have a bad first meeting that translated offset during the time of filming. The setup off screen between the two "gangs" may have also played a part in several actors suffering actual injuries during the big fight scene later in the film.

Coppola took a few measures when making the film, aside from treatment of the teenage actors amongst one another. To give the movie the feel it needed to be set in the 1950s and 60s, Coppola used saturated colors in his filming and a musical score from his own father to achieve such. For the first two weeks of filming, Coppola used a videotape to capture the whole movie before doing it again in film, to help the actors get into character for the final release. And while the film was low on budget and couldn’t pay Hinton the full amount of rights fees to make the movie, she was given a role in the film, along with two other film adaptations Rumble Fish and Tex.