'My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life,' she said. There is, she suggested, a universality in being an adolescent outsider. Hinton said that it hasn't hurt the book's continuing popularity because 'today black and minority kids identify with the Greasers' as outsiders. Still, 'The Outsiders' has an anachronistic feel, an all-white story about teenagers reflecting the segregated Tulsa of the time. 'I had my father's feelings to consider.' He did keep 'Stay Gold,' the theme song inspired by Robert Frost's poem 'Nothing Gold Can Stay,' written by Carmine Coppola and Stevie Wonder, and sung by Wonder. 'I realized the Hollywood score was holding back the film,' Coppola said. He replaced some of the symphonic music composed by his father, Carmine Coppola, who died in 1991, with songs by Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Van Morrison and others. It was cut because, though innocent, early audiences snickered. 'Very often the solution is to get to the second reel fast,' he said.Ĭoppola also restored a scene in which Sodapop comforts his brother, Ponyboy, in bed. In the original film, Coppola went quickly to the main action at the drive-in, but he has now restored an early scene in which the Greaser characters are introduced one by one as they are set upon by Socs. In a telephone interview, Coppola said he re-cut 'The Outsiders' to be truer to the book, and retitled the new version 'The Outsiders: The Complete Novel.' Dillon also starred in the movies of 'Tex,' directed by Tim Hunter, and 'Rumble Fish,' also directed by Coppola. 'The Outsiders' featured young actors on the brink of fame, among them Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise and Emilio Estevez. With each succeeding novel, her fame grew, fueled by movie adaptations, though she insisted on protecting her privacy. She met Inhofe in her freshman biology class at the University of Tulsa, and, she said, he helped her to write again. Then came writer's block and an intense depression.

She gradually made money and bought her first horse. As he was dying, she wrote 'The Outsiders,' inspired, she said, by injustices perpetrated against her Greaser friends by the Socs.Ī friend knew someone whose mother was a children's book writer, and Hinton sent her manuscript to the writer's agent. When she was 15, her father developed a brain tumor. 'I would tell myself, `It'll get better,'' Hinton said. Once her mother threw her manuscripts in the trash burner, but allowed her to rescue them. 'She'd say, `You're part of this family-now act like it.' I hate TV now.' (She wrote two unpublished books before 'The Outsiders.') 'When I was writing, she'd come into my room, grab my hair and throw me in front of the TV,' Hinton said of her mother.

She longed for her own horse and escaped into reading and writing books. Hinton said she was a tomboy, happiest at her grandmother's farm, where her aunt had a horse.

Susan eloise hinton the outsiders