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chapter five ‘‘How’d You Like That Haircut to Begin Just Below the Chin?’’ Juvenile Delinquency, Teenage Killers, and a Pulp Aesthetic in The Outsiders They wanted to jump me, but I had a knife in my belt. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ I said. ‘‘I’ll come back with my gang, and we’ll really go at it.’’ benjamin fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents (1955) Since its appearance in 1967, The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton’s novel about a group of working-class boys struggling to survive in an environment riddled with gang violence, has been heralded as a landmark in the history of literature for young readers. For more than four decades, Hinton’s novel has been ‘‘a yearly best-seller’’ (Hipple par. 2). Frequently taught in schools, commonly found in libraries, and often included on summer reading lists, The Oustiders has earned the status as ‘‘a classic that gets passed down from generation to generation’’ (A. Wilson 10). The critical success and commercial popularity of Hinton’s book is commonly attributed to its innovative nature. Kenneth L. Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen have noted that the year 1967 when The Outsiders made its debut was ‘‘a milestone [one], when writers and publishers turned in a new direction ’’ (14). Prior to this period, narratives aimed at an adolescent audience were typified by titles like Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1942). In the words of Michael Cart, ‘‘These books were set in a Saturday Evening Post world of white faces and white picket fences surrounding small-town, middle-class lives where the worst thing that could happen would be a misunderstanding that threatened to leave someone dateless for the junior prom’’ (20). The Outsiders 149 Hinton’s novel was markedly di√erent. As Jay Daly explains, ‘‘Into this sterile chi√on-and-orchids environment then came The Outsiders. Nobody worries about the prom in The Outsiders; they’re more concerned with just staying alive till June’’ (i). Indeed, the narrator and central character Ponyboy Curtis is not simply assaulted by members of a rival gang at the outset of the text but his very life is threatened. While holding a knife to the fourteen-yearold ’s throat, one of his assailants snarls, ‘‘How’d you like that haircut to begin right below the chin?’’ (5). Interpersonal violence is a recurring feature throughout the book, as the teenage characters square o√ against each other armed with everything from fists and broken bottles to switchblades and guns. Far from mere macho posturing, these encounters routinely turn lethal. Indicating the way in which the origins of YA genre is intimately connected with homicide, no fewer than three teenage characters are killed by the end of the story: one is stabbed during a fight, another is fatally injured during a fire in the book’s climax, and a third is shot by police during a failed robbery. The subject matter of Hinton’s text was groundbreaking; ‘‘no one had seen anything quite like The Outsiders before’’ (A. Wilson 14). Antoine Wilson has argued that Hinton ‘‘started a completely new trend in young adult literature’’ (9). Similarly, Cart has written that the 1967 novel precipitated a ‘‘sea change’’ in narratives for adolescents (43). Meanwhile, Patty Campbell goes one step further, claiming that ‘‘Hinton founded young adult literature with the publication of The Outsiders’’ (‘‘Outsiders’’ 177). The narrative’s gritty plot, combined with its stark language, led critics to credit Hinton with inaugurating a literary style, known as the ‘‘new realism’’ (Cart 39; J. Daly 15). Whereas previous books for young readers had been characterized by romantic sentimentality , The Outsiders took its cue from sociological verisimilitude. In what has become an oft-quoted remark by the author about her motivation for writing the text, she said, ‘‘There was no realistic fiction being written about teenagers when I was in high school—everything was ‘Mary-Jane Goes to The Prom’’’ (‘‘Speaking With S. E. Hinton’’ 185). Hinton wanted to document the lives of young people not as adults nostalgically remembered them or naively idealizedthembutastheyactuallywere,andshesucceeded.Introducing‘‘new kinds of ‘real’ characters’’ to young adult fiction (Cart 47), The Outsiders is, according to critics, nothing less than a ‘‘mold-breaking novel’’ (Hipple par. 2). In this chapter, I argue that while The Outsiders may have been a ‘‘moldbreaking ’’ novel for young readers in many ways, its tone, characters, and content were not entirely innovative. Far from inventing a completely new [3.136.97.64] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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