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The Hate U Give by 
The Outsiders is about two weeks in the life of a 14-year-old boy. The novel tells the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his struggles with right and wrong in a society in which he believes that he is an outsider. According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs for the sake of his fellow greasers--until one terrible night when his friend Johnny kills a soc. The murder gets under Ponyboy's skin, causing his separated world to crumble and teaching him that pain feels the same whether a soc or a greaser.
Goodreads, 2019.
The Outsiders is very much a product of its time and place. Elements of author S.E. Hinton’s real life in the mid-1960s can be found throughout the novel. Despite these specific characteristics, however, the story is written to be universal, a story for young adults everywhere.
GANG CULTURE
S.E. Hinton was fifteen years old when she began composing The Outsiders. However, by this young age, she had already learned enough about the world around her to become dissatisfied by what she saw. The main source of Hinton’s anger was the social-class divide among the students at her high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
On one side of this separation were the greasers, a gang of poor, lower-class young people from the east side of the city. This was the group of which Hinton considered herself a friend, though she never actually joined the gang formally. The opposing gang—referred to as the Socs, or Socials, in the novel—consisted of the wealthy students on Tulsa’s west side.
The central conflicts between the two groups were their social and economic classes. The greasers did not like the wealthy class because they had more money, while the wealthy did not like the greasers because they were poor. This disagreement is what had originally given rise to the gang mentality of the two groups. Poor students joined the greasers because the gang offered them understanding and the feeling of belonging; the same applied to the wealthy gang. Without even thinking that opposing gang members could ever understand one another, the gangs simply became enemies for life. It was the resulting tension and violence between the groups that Hinton attempted to capture in The Outsiders. The major difference between her real life and her novel, however, was that in the story, the greaser Ponyboy learns that he actually has much in common with the Soc girl Cherry. He only needed to allow himself to see her as a person rather than a Soc for this to happen.
The Outsiders: Historical Context. (2015). In Research in Context. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/RPDVYG258997395/MSIC?u=64_ufcc&sid=MSIC&xid=b5febf44
(Born 1950)
S.E. Hinton is a best-selling author of young adult fiction. Her realistic way of describing teenage life has brought her fans worldwide. Hinton has also published books for younger children and adults.
As a young American author, S.E. Hinton decided to write under her initials in order to deflect attention from her gender. She set out to write about the difficult social system that teenagers create among themselves. Her books struck a chord with readers who saw in her characters many elements of this system that existed in their own schools and towns.
S.E. Hinton 2019. Britannica School.
Hinton, S.E. [Image]. Gale.