S.E. Hinton Essay, Research Paper

S.E. HINTON

S.E. Hinton is considered to be one of the greatest writers about youth of all time. Since she often writes from a boy?s point of view, she uses her initials S.E. instead of her name Susan Eloise. She explains this by saying, ?I figured that most boys would look at the book and think, ?What can a chick know about stuff like that??

She was born in 1948 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was raised there and went to college at the University of Tulsa, with education as her major. She wrote her first, and probably most famous novel, The Ousiders, at age 16. It was published three years later in 1967. From this book she became known as the “Voice of the Youth.” After having writer?s block for three years because of the constant pressure around, her future husband urged her to write two pages a day to bring her out of it. She did, and it eventually led to the book That was Then, This is Now. It was finished in 1970, and published in 1971. It again dealt with problems of teenage boys and drug abuse.

In 1975 her third book was released called Rumble Fish. It was her shortest novel, and it got very mixed reviews. It is the story of a fourteen-year-old boy, who tries to emulate his elder brother, a former gang leader. Four years later S.E. published a book called Tex. It got great reviews, and critics talked about how much her books have become more mature over the years. It too deals with two teenage boys who were abandoned by their father.

After four more years, her first son Nick was born. That same year the movie The Outsiders was released. Two months after that, the movie Rumble Fish was released. In 1985 the movie That Was Then, This Is Now was released. In 1988 S.E. was the first person to receive the Margaret A. Edwards Author Achievement Award, given out by the American Library Association. That October she released her first book that wasn’t written in first person, called Taming the Star Runner. This book was about a boy that was sent out to the country to stay with his uncle on a ranch. The story tells how he became close to a horse named Star Runner there.

S.E. has written two more books since that time, but they were written for children around the kindergarten age. She says she has a very normal life, and is uncomfortable talking very personally about it. All of Hinton’s novels are set in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she continues to live with her husband and son. She also loves horse back riding. (Which helped her get the idea for Taming the Star Runner.) She no longer makes public appearances because she doesn’t like to travel. She says the messages she wants to get across are in her books. Susan Eloise Hinton is a great writer that is very respected and loved by many people, but especially the teens because of how well she relates to them in her stories.