SEH: I just hope he isn’t bald! I left those characters 50 years ago. Us: Where would Ponyboy be now? He’s in his ‘60s. I didn’t want to go on to Ponyboy Visits Hawaii or something. Where, for about two weeks in Ponyboy’s life, he learned to look at life completely differently. Besides that, the story ends where it’s supposed to end. I could not re–come up with those emotions. I could remember what it was like to be 16, but I’m not 16. SEH: Oh, no! Even by the time I wrote this I knew it was the end. Us: Have you ever considered writing a sequel? The first reviewers were like, “This young man has written this book …” Then I went to New York and did a bunch of interviews. It’s because they thought first reviewers were going to see this book, see the subject matter and decide a girl wouldn’t know anything about it. It was my publisher’s idea because they wanted to fool the first reviewers. I thought, well, if I wrote this and said a girl was doing this, nobody would believe it.
I was playing football and going to rodeos. I couldn’t identify with anything the female culture was doing at that time. To this day, most of my closest friends are guys. SEH: I grew up in a greaser neighborhood. Some part of me was a lot like Dallas, too, or I wouldn’t be able to write him. Any character you write - I don’t care if you think you’re basing it off your best friend - has some aspect of yourself, because you’re the filter they have to go through to get on the page. Ponyboy is probably the closest character I’ve ever written to me personally. SEH: It’s a combination of a lot of people. Us: Is there a real life Ponyboy you based his character on? I was watching this and everybody following these rules without questioning where they came from or why we should be following them or anything. You had to limit your friendships to those that were in your group. I grew up in a greaser neighborhood, and I got put into what you’d call AP classes these days. The whole class warfare thing was absolutely going on in my high school. Us: Was it based on the experiences you were going through at the time? There wasn’t anything realistic being written about teen life at that time. I liked writing since I learned how to read, and I had been writing for about eight years when I wrote The Outsiders, so it wasn’t just all of sudden I could sit and write a book. I went back and put in more details, flashbacks, new little asides. The year I was 16, my junior year of high school, was the year I really put the work in. The first draft was about 40 pages long, single-spaced type. Us: What inspired you to write The Outsiders? Hinton: Pretty old! How many writers get to experience this, though? I’m trying to enjoy it. Us Weekly: How does this monumental anniversary make you feel? Hinton attends the 14th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books – Day 2 at UCLA on April 26, 2009, in Los Angeles.
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