Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 22, 1950. She earned her B.S. degree from the University of Tulsa in 1970. Viking published The Outsiders, Hinton’s first novel, in 1967, when she was just seventeen years old.
After three years of writer’s block, she published That Was Then, This Is Now in 1971 by writing two pages every day. The summer before, she had married David Inhofe. Hinton’s shortest novel, Rumble Fish, was published in 1975. It had previously been published as a short story in a 1968 edition of Nimrod, the literary supplement for the University of Tulsa Alumni Magazine. Tex was published in 1979. Hinton didn’t publish another book until Taming the Star Runner in 1988.
In August of 1983, Hinton’s son, Nick, was born. In 1988, Hinton became the first recipient of the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association and School Library Journal Author Achievement Award. Other awards include the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1989, also from the Young Adult Library Services Association, and the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 from the Oklahoma Center for the Book.
Hinton has written two children’s books: Big David, Little David, published in 1995, and her most recent book, The Puppy Sister.
Published in 1967 by Viking Press, The Outsiders was S.E. Hinton's first novel. The rivalry between the "greasers" and the "socs" was based on events in her own high school, the Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton began writing the...
That was Then, This is Now was published in 1971. Its title is derived from one of the pivotal lines of the book. It is set in the same world as The Outsiders, which was published 4 years before it in 1967, and even features a brief overlap of...
