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Essay on Biography of S. E. Hinton
Susie Hinton's first draft of The Outsiders (1967) was about 40 single-spaced, typed pages long. She was just a 17-year-old kid living in Tulsa. Her father was dying of cancer, so she retreated into a world of damned teenage boys from the wrong side of town. A friend's mother sent Hinton's manuscript to a New York publisher and just like that, S.E. Hinton was born. The young author got a $1,000 advance and bought herself a dark teal Camaro. When her first royalty check arrived in the mail, she spent the 12 bucks on three tanks of gas. Since it was published in 1967, The Outsiders has sold more than 10 million copies. Her other young-adult novels, That Was Then, This is Now (1971), Rumble Fish (1975), and Tex (1979), are all teen classics.
The potential of the market was dramatically illustrated by the success of S. E. Hinton 1967 novel The Outsiders. Because Hinton was a high school student when she wrote The Outsiders, she understood the teen world with a depth that adult writers could not approach. Set in Tulsa, where Hinton lived, the novel explores through the character of Ponyboy, whose voice Hinton assumed, the division between the delinquents and the "clean teens" and exposed the good kids as not so good after all. Hinton has often said that she wrote it because she did not want to read books about girls going to the prom and could not find anything else to satisfy her. Although its language seems tame in the Nineties, its violent scenes and its romantic sensitivity still bring teen joys and problems to vivid life.
The four Young Adult novels of S.E. Hinton have sold millions of copies and have made their rough-tender way into successful Hollywood movies, usually starring Matt Dillon, one of teen-age America's heart-throbs....
