S.E. (Susan Eloise) Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1948. She wrote her first novel, The Outsiders, when she was only sixteen years old; the book was published in 1967, when she was nineteen, and met with tremendous commercial success and critical acclaim.
Hinton married in 1971. She struggled for several years in the wake of The Outsiders' success, feeling significant pressure and depression. However, she recovered, and went on to write a number of other successful novels for young adults, including That Was Then, This Is Now, Taming the Star Runner, Rumble Fish, and Tex. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish were both adapted into films by legendary director Francis Ford Coppola in...