(Please note this article contains spoilers!)
ONE: Teenagers fuelled a new direction in publishing in the 1960s
Michael Cart (2016) points out that in the 1930s, mass unemployment led to a new generation of teenagers being educated longer at school, and thirsting to read books which in some ways matched their lives. Such books ‘centered on high school social life, including such courtship rituals as dancing and dating with their attendant etiquette’ (Ibid: 2). According to Cart, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) addressed a need for teenagers to read about their ‘reality’. Indeed, The Outsiders (1967) heralded a new era in publishing. This tale of two teenage gangs, the Socs and the Greasers, fighting each other on the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, brought the themes of angst, family breakdown and violent social snobbery to a new teenage audience. For that reason, the novel is credited as having created ‘the Young Adult’ (YA) novel. As Ramdashan and Bold comment:
It changed the way that teenagers read and the way authors wrote for teenagers. The novel, written by 17 year Hinton, was born out of frustration of how teenage life was depicted in literature.’ (Ramdarshan & Bold 2019: 25)
Ramdashan and Bold note that its success had reasons behind it. It was ‘This was partly because publishers were directly targeting teenage consumers, who frequented shopping ‘malls’ with their increased disposable income, rather than selling, solely, to librarians or teachers‘ (25). In some senses, the novel has more in common with films of the time than any other works of literary fiction. The main character, Ponyboy, a fourteen year old, describes leaves the cinema at the very beginning of the book, wishing he was like Paul Newman, then a young, handsome movie star who often played rebellious young men. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole novel is a homage to the film/musical West Side Story (1961). It’s not difficult to imagine SE Hinton rewriting West Side Story in her own hometown context of Tulsa. The two stories have many similarities: two rival gangs where social class, poverty and the quest for territory has produced much violence and enmity, male and female protagonists who connect with each other, the protagonist fleeing the scene of a tragic killing and going into hiding, and violent climaxes. Yes, there are differences: Hinton’s story is not a love story, although Ponyboy and Cherry do have a platonic romance of sorts, and Ponyboy is not killed at the end, but rather writes the narrative for his English teacher. But my central point is inescapable. The Outsiders is more influenced by the movies than other literature of the time. This is probably why it was so popular — and remains popular — with young adult audiences. It heralded a really interesting relationship with young adult fiction and films. Young adult books like the Goosebumps series were clearly influenced by horror movies, while J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series draws motifs from films like Excalibur and The Princess Bride, and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books from vampire movies. And this relationship was, and is, reciprocal: it is not surprising that Rowling and Meyer’s books led to very successful movies being made. So we could argue that Young Adult fiction has an intertextual relationship with movies: the stories of the movies and the books speak to each other and shape each other in fascinating ways.
A key point here is that teenagers were and are both consumers of movies and books. When the publishing industry woke up to this fact, it really began to change the way it published young adult fiction.
TWO: Outsiders are often ostracized by mainstream publishing
It is important to note though that Hinton’s The Outsiders was an extreme oddity when it was first published. It was a book written by a teenager for a teenage audience, whereas before such fiction had been carefully curated by teachers, librarians and patrician publishers (Cart 2016). While most teenagers reading the book had not encountered worlds that were as violent as the streets of Tulsa depicted in the story, its themes of alienation spoke to them. Publishing has been, and remains, a conservative industry (Kelman 2019), with publishers often being owned and run by rich people who can afford to make losses. While a publishing imprint may not be the most lucrative investment for a wealthy person, it can provide significant cultural, political and social influence (Kelman 2019) for its owners. The novelist James Kelman points this out in his chapter ‘Art and the Lower Orders’. He argues that writers and more generally artists are victims of a pernicious social system, where the values of wealthy, upper class people are promoted, and the ‘lower orders’ — people from less wealthy backgrounds — are consistently marginalised, used and abused. He provides his own writing life as an example of this. He writes:
A few years on came my novel about a man who goes blind after receiving a battering from police officers. This too was narrated in the ‘voice’ of a working-class Glasgow man. I was used to hostile reactions to my work but ill-prepared for the levels it reached when it won the Booker Prize in 1994. (Kelman 2019: 123)
Here we can see that even when an ‘outsider’ like James Kelman is successful — winning the most prestigious prize in the literary world — they can face many barriers in trying to pursue a writer’s life. So while the publishing world might make profits from the work of and about outsiders it also can continue to marginalise them.
THREE: Publishing processes can bring outsiders’ work to a wider public
The processes of publishing can transform society. The invention of the mechanised printing press led to works such as Martin Luther’s 99 Theses (1517), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract(1762) and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) being disseminated amongst a large public, which ultimately led to massive social change and revolution.
However, in more recent years, while the cost of printing and publishing has been reduced, the influence of major media publishing outlets has predominated, with smaller publishing outfits struggling to find a place in a crowded market. As Cart and others point out (2016), there has been a drift away from the initial ‘contemporary realism’ of the YA genre, and more of a focus upon fantasy. Cart writes:
YA has truly become the tail that wags the dog of publishing. Part of its runaway success is due now to its expanding audience, one that is defined by the word “crossover,” for, studies show, an astonishing 65% -plus of YA book purchases are now being made not by YAs but, instead, by adult readers, lured by the siren songs of Rowling, Meyer, Collins, Roth, Green, and a sixth author whose name should be mentioned in this context, Rainbow Rowell. (Cart 2016: 9)
FOUR: Publishers have made a huge amount of money from books about outsiders
Books about outsiders have created huge profits for publishers. While they may not have been initially successful, novels such as Notes from the Underground (1864)by Dostoyevsky, The Trial (1925) by Kafka, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys, and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1964) which explores the phenomenon of the literary and social outsider, have all sold very well in a market where people want to read about their own alienation.
Recently though, writers themselves though have been marginalised and ostracised, with their incomes becoming significantly reduced. The Society of Authors, a trade union for writers, notes that for writers in 2022 there was:
- The 60% fall in earnings has pushed median earnings to below minimum wage levels
- The gender gap is expanding – men are earning typically 41% more than women (vs 33% in 2016/17)
- The top 10% of authors earn about 47% of all author income
- The proportion of authors earning all their income from writing has decreased from 40% in 2006 to 19% today
- Authors’ dependence on portfolio earnings has increased
- Women, black and mixed-race authors, along with younger and older authors, all earn less than their respective counterparts
- Publishing advances are becoming rarer, while buy-out contracts are becoming more frequent. (Reed 2022)
This in the context where overall the publishing industry is booming. In the United Kingdom alone, the annual revenue for the publishing industry exceeded £7 billion, ‘this was a 3% increase from 2022 and the highest level ever for the industry’ (Publishers Association 2023). As Michael Cart perceives, the Young Adult novel is booming, with 6,000 YA books being published every year. He says:
How long the market can sustain this volume is anybody’s guess, though Simon & Schuster’s David Gale tells me he thinks YA is currently being overpublished. Yet sales remain stratospheric – up 22.4% in 2014 alone, while adult sales actually declined by 3.3% in the same period. (Cart 2016: 9)
FIVE: Books about outsiders have changed the direction of publishing
So to sum up, we can safely say that books about and for outsiders have changed the face of publishing, and are continuing to do so. Michael Cart’s analysis of the demographics involved in the YA publishing world are still valid today, if not more so. He illustrates how America’s Asian, Black and Hispanic populations have all grown in their millions in the last decade and that young people from so-called ‘minorities’ represented nearly 50% of the young population (Cart 2016:10). He also shows how LGBTQI literature is alive and flourishing. (Cart 2016: 11) The popularity of books like The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, alumni of the MA Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths demonstrate this. This story of a mixed-race teenager who learns to come to terms with his homosexuality and becomes a drag artist has become a very popular book, largely through word of mouth, and is part of a zeitgeist which is changing publishing yet again.
References
Cart, Michael (2016) “Young Adult Literature: The State of a Restless Art,” SLIS Connecting: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 7. DOI: 10.18785/slis.0501.07 Available at: https://aquila.usm.edu/slisconnecting/vol5/iss1/7
Hinton, S.E. (1967) The Outsiders. New York: Viking Press. Reprinted, London: Penguin Books. 2016.
Kelman, J. (2019) ‘Art and the Lower Orders’ in Yasmin, R. Brave New Words (2019) London: Penguin Books.
Publishers’ Association (2023) UK publishing revenue exceeds £7 billion for first time URL: https://www.publishers.org.uk/publishingin2023/ (Accessed 6/01/2025)
Ramdarshan and Bold(2019) Inclusive Young Adult Fiction : Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom, Springer International Publishing AG, 2019. Chapter 2.
Reed, M. (2022) A profession struggling to sustain itself. London: Society of Authors. URL: https://societyofauthors.org/2022/12/06/a-profession-struggling-to-sustain-itself/
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