S. E. Hinton is on Twitter. If you follow her, you know that she enjoys margaritas (especially on Fridays), that she feels out of sorts when her husband is away, and that she is a huge fan of the television show “Supernatural” (#SPN). These details are run-of-the-mill Twitter fodder. As D.T. Max noted in his recent Profile of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the platform is “an ideal medium for celebrities trying to create a simulacrum of intimacy with fans.” But unlike Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and other top celebrity tweeters, Hinton has long had a reputation for being publicity-averse. Earlier this year, Thomas Beller nominated J.D. Salinger as “the least likely tweeter in literary history.” I would have put Hinton on the shortlist. While not quite in the recluse category of Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, Hinton rarely makes public appearances, doesn’t write book reviews or participate in other literary journalism, and, by her own admission, says no to most interview requests. To find that she has posted more than eighteen thousand tweets is a bit like coming across a trove of Banksy’s family pictures on Facebook.
When I discovered Hinton’s feed a few months ago, my first instinct was to think it was a hoax along the lines of the account that was once attributed to Cormac McCarthy (who is Hinton’s kin in terms of his devoted following and his dislike of the public eye). Though Hinton’s Twitter account lacks the blue “verified” badge, I’ve come to believe it is genuine. Not only does she exchange tweets with the verified accounts of Rob Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, and other actors who starred in the film adaptations of her books; her copious stream also exhibits the ineluctable quirkiness of the real. She recently tweeted that she had a dream about playing basketball with Stephen King:
And then, the next tweet:
It’s hard not to be charmed by that. The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that Twitter is the perfect medium for a writer like Hinton (i.e., one who values her privacy but is not a misanthrope). She can interact with readers while remaining completely in control of the exchange. Hinton is affable and responsive on Twitter, but the boundaries are clear. She retweets, but doesn’t follow. She will dispense writing advice, but refuses to help with school projects. She doesn’t mind fan fiction based on her books, but she is also upfront about not reading it (though there are rumors that she writes it on the sly).
Lately, Hinton has taken to Twitter to encourage her followers to vote for “The Outsiders” in a March Madness-style bracket that Entertainment Weekly is running to determine the greatest Young Adult novel of all time. On November 5th, Hinton tweeted, “I’ll admit, I would like to be in the top 10.” (In bracketology, that would be the Elite Eight.) “The Outsiders” defeated Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” in the opening round, and now faces off against Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Earthsea Cycle.” Should “The Outsiders” advance, even tougher opponents lie ahead: Mark Twain, Madeleine L’Engle, and Haper Lee are also in Hinton’s half of the draw. (Wisely, the editors opted not to seed the tournament.)
The Entertainment Weekly bracket is yet another sign of the present flourishing of the Y.A. genre. In addition to the science-fiction and fantasy blockbusters by J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins, there have, in recent years, been a number of more realistic mega-sellers, like John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” and Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” The launch earlier this year of Lizzie Skurnick Books, which is re-issuing Young Adult classics by authors such as Lois Duncan and Ellen Conford, is a reminder that this is not exclusively a twenty-first century phenomenon. “Y.A. actually had an enormous boom during the nineteen-seventies and eighties,” Skurnick told me. “But since it was read by teen-age girls sans Twitter, and we didn’t have so many public market rankings, nobody but the avid readers really noticed.”
That earlier Y.A. heyday also happens to be when I came of age as a reader. Like many Americans of my generation, I was introduced to Hinton’s work in middle school. “Tex” (Hinton’s own favorite among her Y.A. novels) was assigned to me in eighth-grade English. Upon finishing it, I immediately went to the library to borrow “The Outsiders,” “Rumble Fish,” and “That Was Then, This is Now,” devouring each hungrily in two or three sittings. This was a watershed moment in my young life; never had I read books with such voraciousness. In fact, prior to discovering Hinton’s novels, I had not willingly read any work of fiction since Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” which had scuttled my interest in reading when I was six. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Sendak’s book. It was that I liked it far too much. Max and the Wild Things haunted my childhood. Throughout elementary school, I suffered nightmares in which those toothy monsters held me captive or threatened to murder my family if I did not come up with an exorbitantly large ransom (usually fifty dollars). From the ages of six to twelve, no work of the imagination could hold my attention. Everything paled in comparison to Sendak’s picture book. (In retrospect, this refusal to read may have been defensive: I didn’t want any more nightmares.)
Hinton’s books were populated with a different species of wild things: Greasers and Socs; boys my age fighting with switchblades and broken bottles; abusive fathers; and dead mothers. The books were written in plainspoken English, with a sprinkling of slang. The plots were easy to follow, the characters’ wardrobes and hairstyles carefully described. Hinton’s Tulsa was simultaneously commensurate and incommensurate with my own life. Ponyboy’s interaction with the beautiful Cherry Valance at the drive-in seemed like a template for all of my relationships with inaccessible girls in middle school and high school. I may not have been pursued by a blue Mustang full of madras-wearing sons of privilege, but I fully recognized what Hinton called “the shade of difference” that we all feel in adolescence. The kicker to all of this was learning that the “S” in the author’s byline stood for Susan, and the “E” for Eloise. The writer of these searing books about young men was a woman.
“The Outsiders,” published in 1967, remains the most celebrated and popular of Hinton’s books, and still sells thousands of copies a year. The Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation, starring a who’s who of Brat Pack actors, has certainly aided the book’s longevity. And Johnny Cade’s dying words, “Stay gold,” though often misquoted, have become pop-culture currency. (Hinton recently tweeted: “For the record, it is ‘stay gold’ not ‘stay golden’ No ‘en’.”) The novel’s origin story also helps its celebrity, giving the book an irrefutable authenticity. Hinton began writing “The Outsiders” when she was fifteen. She based the novel on events and characters she knew growing up in Tulsa. Though she earned a D in creative writing while she was working on the “The Outsiders,” she was awarded a book deal on the same day she received her high-school diploma. Re-reading it recently, I was persuaded again by the depth of Hinton’s characterization and her clear-eyed portrayal of teen-age savagery on both sides of the societal divide. The author’s youthfulness shows up in the pivotal scene, in which Ponyboy, Johnny, and Dallas save the schoolchildren from the burning church. That turning point feels more than a little contrived now. In a 2009 interview with Jane Smiley, Hinton acknowledged as much: “I asked my friends what should happen in the story, and they would say, ‘Oh, the church should burn down.’ ” Despite its flaws, “The Outsiders,” like Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” refuses to be confined to the era in which it was created. It speaks across generations.
The Hinton book that speaks most strongly to me now, though, is “Rumble Fish,” published in 1975. The novel (really a novella) originated as a short story and retains the compact power of that genre. It has a small cast of characters and a simple plot. Every gesture feels essential. The narrator is Rusty-James, a teen-ager so tough that a teacher offers him five dollars to beat up a troublesome fellow student. Long abandoned by his mother, Rusty-James lives with his itinerant, alcoholic father. At the beginning of the novel, his older brother, known only as the Motorcycle Boy, returns home to Tulsa after spending time in California searching, it is later revealed, for their mother. Once a gang leader, the Motorcycle Boy is handsome, enigmatic, and charismatic. Hinton memorably describes him as having an “expressionless animal face” and “strange eyes—they made me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflection you saw was your own.” He’d had, we are told, “a lot of concussions in motorcycle wrecks.” Emblematic of all of the lost youth in Hinton’s books, the Motorcycle Boy wanders the nighttime streets of Tulsa in a state that these days might be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. Unable to find a place himself—and to offer his younger brother guidance toward a better life—he is killed by police after breaking into a pet store and setting free the caged animals. It is the most devastating of all of Hinton’s novels.
Before I discovered her on Twitter, Hinton had, like the Motorcyle Boy, been a figure of awesome mystery for me. As much as I enjoy reading her feed, a part of me retrospectively wants her to remain elusive and unknowable. I’m tempted to unfollow her, but that would be like shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped. I’ll have to settle for the knowledge that Hinton is not like the Motorcycle Boy at all. She belongs to a writer’s group, loves horses, and really wants you to vote for “The Outsiders” in Entertainment Weekly’s Y.A. bracket. Go do it.
Photograph by Kelly Kerr/The Tulsa World/AP.
