Setting is crucial to this story, for it is through their environment, the inner city, that the main characters are defined: they live on the wrong side of the tracks, and their surroundings force them to grow up quickly and to become tough. Hinton modeled the book's setting on her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, although she never refers to the city by name. The novel is most likely set in the mid-1960s, the time period during which it was written, although, again, Hinton makes few explicit references to external historical events that might fix the book in time.

In The Outsiders, the city is dirty, noisy, crowded, and full of danger. With the city's art museums, concert halls, and theaters traditionally off-limits, the only sources of culture available to the poor boys, or "greasers," are the rodeo and the movies. Many of the greasers dream of the...