… Oh god, for once, I’d like to discuss Rumble Fish.”

This may be the last interview on The Outsiders I’ll ever give. The thought of getting into it one more time is almost paralyzing. “I am very tired of talking about ,” says Hinton, now 74. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images Dillon also appeared in The Outsiders as Dallas 'Dally' Winston. The story would come to define her life-even though these days she would rather discuss just about anything else. More than half a century ago, Susie Hinton (soon to be known by her gender-neutral pen name) was a student at Will Rogers, where she received a D in creative writing because class assignments were nowhere near as important to her as working out the plot and characters of The Outsiders. “It’s been a long time, so I was kind of looking around … and a woman came up and asked me, ‘Is this your first time inside the school?’ I said, ‘No, not really.’” “It was funny when I first came into the building,” she said near the end of a phone conversation last Halloween, a week and a half after her appearance with Macchio. Prior to the event, Hinton was quietly going about her business, wandering the school’s halls absent-mindedly. Hinton, the writer whose teenage words would forever be emblematic of young adult literature and whose most famous creation, The Outsiders, helped launch Macchio’s career some 40 years earlier. Hosted by Magic City Books, the live conversation in the Art Deco auditorium at Will Rogers High School featured another pop culture icon: S.E. Ralph Macchio (most recently of “ Cobra Kai” fame) was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to promote his memoir, Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me. In late October 2022, a big-time streaming star returned to the city where it all began for him.

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton