It was all Mary Jane goes to the prom, that kind of stuff. I'd been to a few proms and they weren't anything like that. There weren't any books that dealt realistically with teenage life so I wrote The Outsiders to fill thatgap" (Hinton in Garrett and McCue, p. 66). Hinton's characters, as Ponyboy himself notes at the end of the novel, are people whose stories had not yet been told. In the novel Ponyboy and the rest of the greasers are worried not about the prom, but about their own survival. The Outsiders was one of the first novels to portray their world and the anxieties it generated.
Hinton's novel helped launch a movement called "realism" or "new realism" in young adult literature. Authors in the movement sought to portray difficult, serious, and thoroughly contemporary teenage issues. After The Outsiders it became popular to write, in the words of Richard Peck, "books about young people parents thought their children didn't know" (Peck in Cart, p. 45). This trend mushroomed, spawning "a veritable avalanche of young adult works some of which focus on heretofore taboo topics: teenage pregnancy, homosexual relationships,brutality and sadism, divorce, abusive parents, corrupt public officials, gang violence, murder, substance abuse, and so and on.
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