Stay gold

The New York Times is currently featuring an essay about S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders, which is enjoying its fortieth anniversary this year.

While Hinton's West-Side-Story-esque melodrama has always seemed a little cheeseball to me, I admire her achievement: Hinton started writing The Outsiders when she was a mere fifteen-year-old whippersnapper, but it went on to become the best-selling young-adult novel of all time. (Even better, it holds the #43 spot on the American Library Association's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books* list!)

*Which makes for fascinating reading, all by itself. Did you know that A Wrinkle in Time has been challenged more times than such classics as Curses, Hexes, and Spells, The New Joy of Gay Sex, and Howard Stern's "manifesto", the elegantly titled Private Parts? Terrifying, isn't it?