The Outsiders (Penguin Modern Classics) by S.E. Hinton

Adapted into an award-winning film by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe and Tom Cruise, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders is a young adult novel of enduring power. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is published with an introduction by Jodi Picoult, author of My Sister's Keeper.

The Greasers and the rich-kid Socs are at war on the Tulsa streets. Ponyboy, a fourteen-year-old brawler, chainsmoker and dreamer, is a fiercely loyal greaser. But a single, murderous catastrophe is to wrench him from his old life and overturn everything he thinks he knows. The Outsiders was an audacious debut written when S.E. Hinton was only seventeen, laying bare the hopes and terrors between teenage bravado in a world of drive-ins, drag races and switchblades. It confronted America with a new breed of anti-hero from the wrong side of the class divide, and became a bestselling classic of youthful rebellion.

Susan Eloise Hinton (b. 1950) wrote her first book, The Outsiders, in 1967, when she was seventeen years old. Hinton is also the author of That Was When, This Is Now (1971), adapted into a film starring Emilio Estevez and Morgan Freeman; Rumble Fish (1975), also adapted into a film by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Mickey Rourke, Nicholas Cage and Dennis Hopper; Tex (1979); Taming the Star Runner (1988), and many others. Hinton lives in Oklahoma.

If you enjoyed The Outsiders, you might like Jack Kerouac's On the Road, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Gritty, emotional and very authentic'

Jodi Picoult

'The Outsiders is a teenage epic'

Francis Ford Coppola