By Steve Rhodes
“On June 7, S.E. Hinton will make a rare appearance and accept the Tribune’s Young Adult Book Prize at the “Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair,” the Tribune notes. “The Outsiders, Hinton’s first and most famous book, was first published 41 years ago, when Hinton was only 17. The book has sold more than 13 million copies and become a standard on middle-school reading lists.”
In connection with that appearance, the Tribune published “The Brotherhood of S.E. Hinton” on Saturday, a fine essay by Lizzie Skurnick.
Here are some other Outsiders resources and tidbits.
Let’s do it for Johnny, man. We’ll do it for Johnny!
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I couldn’t help but think while reading Skurnick’s essay about the gangs of today; how white gangs and cliques of the past – West Side Story, Grease – are romanticized, but today’s predominantly black gangs seem so inscrutable to so many. True enough, the firepower and murderous results are greater in magnitude, but are the impulses to escape desperation for brotherhood much different?
Flood an oppressed community of Ponyboy Curtis’s with crack while removing manufacturing jobs and disinvesting in social services and the result is the same.
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From the Wikipedia entry for the book:
While flipping through the copy of Gone With the Wind Two-Bit had bought for Johnny, Ponyboy finds a letter Johnny wrote to him, explaining that “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in the Frost poem meant to always appreciate the things one finds wondrous when one is young. “Staying gold” is the way to be (“Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold . . . “), and Johnny urges Ponyboy to tell Dallas this. It is, of course, too late to tell Dallas, and Ponyboy thinks about other kids in the world that are in similar situations. He thinks about Johnny, Dallas, Bob, and all the others who would die young; who would stay hoodlums forever. Inspired, Ponyboy calls his English teacher and is told that his composition can be as long as he wants it to be, so he starts writing it, beginning by recounting the events of the day that changed his life forever, and it is revealed that his composition is the novel itself, with the same starting sentence: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home . . . ”
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
From the Wikipedia entry for the film:
Francis Ford Coppola never actually wanted to make a movie about teen angst. What changed his mind was a middle school class, great fans of The Godfather, wrote to him about making a sort of gangster film, except about The Outsiders. When he read the book, he was moved and not only directed the film, he also adapted Rumble Fish into a movie the year after, again with Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and Glenn Withrow.
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The actors playing the Socs were put in luxury hotel accommodations and given leather-bound scripts, while the Greaser-actors were put on the ground floor and received tattered scripts. Coppola is said to have done this to create tension between both groups before filming.
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Official sites:
sehinton.com
www.theoutsidersbookandmovie.com/
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C. Thomas Howell sighting: It’s hard to take.
But not as hard as this.
Sorry to be such a buzzkill. But nothing gold can stay.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on June 3, 2008