S.E. Hinton grew up and lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma when she wrote The Outsiders. She was a sixteen-year-old high school student when she wrote the novel. She was a tomboy who played football and hung out with boys. When she was young, she read everything from cereal boxes to coffee labels. Reading taught her sentence structure, paragraphing, and how to build a chapter. When writing stories she always knew her characters-what they looked like, their birthday, or what they liked for breakfast. She gets ideas for characters from real people, but her characters only existed in her head.
S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders while in high school. She got the idea for the book from one their friends. One of her friends was walking home from school when some "nice" kids jumped out of their car and beat him up. They did this because they didn't like him being a greaser. She was angered by this and went home and started writing a story about a boy who gets beat up walking home from the movies. This was the beginning of The Outsiders.
Hinton was both inspired and influenced by many books and authors. Some of her favorite authors include Jane Austen, Mary Renault, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Shirley Jackson. Her favorite books are The Haunting of Hill House, Fire from Heaven, Emma, and Tender Is the Night. These authors and books influenced her to start writing. S.E. Hinton uses her initials instead of her full name because her publisher was afraid the reviewers would assume a girl couldn't write a book like The Outsiders. Her full name is Susan Eloise Hinton.
Hinton was both inspired and influenced by many books and authors. Some of her favorite authors include Jane Austen, Mary Renault, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Shirley Jackson. Her favorite books are The Haunting of Hill House, Fire from Heaven, Emma, and Tender Is the Night. These authors and books influenced her to start writing. S.E. Hinton uses her initials instead of her full name because her publisher was afraid the reviewers would assume a girl couldn't write a book like The Outsiders. Her full name is Susan Eloise Hinton.