The message that S.E. Hinton was trying to tell readers through the book The Outsiders is that one should not judge a book by its cover. An example of this would be how Ponyboy thought that all Socs are bad because they were Socs. But once Ponyboy got to know Cherry and Randy, he realized that they weren’t the violent, snobbish, rich kids that many people he thought that they were. Ponyboy didn’t get to know those two until later on in the book so throughout the book, he had a distorted vision that all Socs had a perfect life so he always hated the Socs for having everything that he wished that he had. After he met them and got to talk to them, he saw a side to the Socs that no one had seen before. Ponyboy also learns this lesson about Darry.
