SOURCE CITATION
"S(usan) E(loise) Hinton." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph provided by Penguin Books for Young Readers.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Novelist S. E. Hinton is credited with revolutionizing the young adult genre by portraying teenagers realistically rather than formulaically and by creating characters, settings, and dialogue that are representative of teenage life in America. Her one-time cult classic, The Outsiders (published in 1967, when she was seventeen years old), was the first in her short but impressive list of books to feature troubled but sensitive male adolescents as protagonists. Hinton's subjects include social class rivalry, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, and teenage cruelty. Film rights to all five of her novels have been acquired, and four have been adapted as major motion pictures.

Hinton was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the setting of most of her novels. She was an avid reader as a child and soon began writing stories about cowboys, horses, and other topics of interest to her. While a student at Will Rogers High School, she began writing The Outsiders and saw the novel evolve through four drafts before submitting it to Curtis Brown literary agent Marilyn Marlow. A publication contract with Viking arrived during her high school graduation ceremony. Loosely based on her own experiences and those of friends and acquaintances, the book is about the ongoing rivalry and conflict that leads to a deadly confrontation between two gangs--the lower-class "greasers" and their upper-middle-class counterparts, the "socs" (short for socials). The Outsiders was an instant hit among teenagers and sold more than four million copies in the United States.

Writing from the male perspective, Hinton has a unique understanding of her subjects that allows her to create believable characters successfully. Ponyboy Curtis, the fourteen-year-old narrator in The Outsiders, has warranted comparison to J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye: "He watches sunsets and looks at the stars and aches for something better," wrote critic William Jay Jacobs in The Record. "But as much as the sensitive, thoughtful Ponyboy resembles Holden, his milieu is irrevocably different. All around him are hostility and fear, along with distrust for the 'system'."

With the money she earned from The Outsiders, Hinton attended the University of Tulsa and earned a degree in education in 1970. She met her future husband, David Inhofe, while in school, and it was he who encouraged her to write her second novel, That Was Then, This Is Now, published in 1971. After suffering for several years from writer's block--"I couldn't even write a letter," she told Carol Wallace of the Daily News--the work was slow but the result rewarding. Hinton considered her second novel superior to the first. The story focuses on two foster brothers who move in different directions: one becomes involved with school and girls while the other sinks into a world of drugs and crime. "The phrase 'if only' is perhaps the most bittersweet in the language," wrote Michael Cart in the New York Times Book Review. "And Miss Hinton uses it skillfully to underline her theme: growth can be a dangerous process."

Hinton continued her pattern of producing a novel every four years with the publication of Rumble Fish in 1975 and Tex in 1979. The former centers on a delinquent youth struggling to gain a tough reputation, and the latter (set in California) on two teenage brothers left in each other's care by their traveling father. As with her previous works, the characters are skillfully drawn and the plots are fast-paced and exciting.

Some critics, like Michael Malone of Nation, have chastised Hinton for "mythologizing the tragic beauty of violent youth" and "avoiding the problem of parental authority and conflict" by placing her characters outside of their families. She has also been criticized for creating similar plots in consecutive books. But librarians cite Hinton as one of the most popular authors among "reluctant readers" in the junior-high age group, as well as among teachers, who regularly use her novels as assigned reading. "Teen-agers should not be written down to," Hinton said in New York Times Book Review. "Anyone can tell when his intelligence is being underestimated. Those who are not ready for adult novels can easily have their love of reading killed by the inane junk lining the teen-age shelf in the library."

In 1988, Hinton's fifth novel, Taming the Star Runner, was published. The fifteen-year-old protaganist is a "young hood, desperately tough and desperately vulnerable," according to New York Times Book Review critic Patty Campbell. Young Travis is a budding writer forced to move to his uncle's Oklahoma horse ranch in order to stay out of trouble.

During the nearly ten-year interim between the publication of Tex and Taming the Star Runner, Hinton started a family and worked as a consultant on the film adaptations of her novels. Involved in the casting, scriptwriting, directing, and even acting, Hinton found the experience pleasurable but still preferred writing to consulting. "Once I sold the books I expected to be asked to drop off the face of the earth," Hinton told Dave Smith of the Los Angeles Times. "But that didn't happen. I know that I had extremely rare experiences for a writer."

Since publication of Taming the Star Runner, Hinton's work has traveled light miles away from her cast of outsiders and bad boys. The year 1995 saw publication of two Hinton titles, both for younger readers. Big David, Little David is a picture book based on a joke she and her husband played on their son Nick when the boy was entering kindergarten. In the book, a boy named Nick wonders if a classmate who resembles his father and has the same name could possibly be the same person as his father. Another title inspired by her son is The Puppy Sister, about a sibling rivalry between a puppy and an only child, a situation complicated when the puppy slowly changes into a human sister.

Through her popular novels and their equally popular film adaptations, Hinton has developed a reputation as a perceptive writer of young adult fiction. In 1988, she was honored with the first American Library Association/School Library Journal Author Achievement award for her body of work. "I don't think I have a masterpiece in me, but I do know I'm writing well in the area I choose to write in," Hinton explained to Smith. "I understand kids and I really like them. And I have a very good memory. I remember exactly what it was like to be a teenager that nobody listened to or paid attention to or wanted around."

UPDATES
September 2004: Hinton's Hawkes Harbor, a novel for adults, was published by Tor. It's Hinton's first novel in sixteen years. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, August 25, 2004.

September 9, 2005: A re-cut version of Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film adaptation of Hinton's book The Outsiders was released in theaters and on DVD as The Outsiders: The Complete Novel. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, September 7, 2005.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born 1948, in Tulsa, OK; married David E. Inhofe (a mail order businessman), September, 1970; children: Nicholas David. Education: University of Tulsa, B.S., 1970. Addresses: Home--Tulsa, OK. Agent--c/o Press Relations, Dell Publishing Co., 666 Fifth Avenue, 10th Fl., New York, NY 10103.

CAREER
Writer of young adult novels since age sixteen. Consultant on film adaptations of her novels; minor acting roles in some film adaptations of her novels.