S.E. Hinton is the beloved author of novels for young adults. At 17, she was inspired to write The Outsiders, her first and most popular novel, because of the two divided groups in her high school, the Greasers and the Socs. The Outsiders was published by Viking in 1967 and it became the second-best-selling young-adult novel in publishing history, with more than eight million copies in print.
Hinton’s publisher suggested she use her initials instead of her first name (Susan) so that male reviewers would not ignore the novel for having been written by a female; she subsequently chose to continue using her initials so as to better separate her public life from her private life. After The Outsiders, her best-known book is Rumble Fish which was originally published in 1968 as a short story in the University of Tulsa literary journal Nimrod and later expanded into a novel. She also wrote That Was Then, This is Now, Tex and Taming the Star Runner. Film adaptions of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, established the careers of many film stars such as, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane and Emilio Estevez.
S.E. had just finished reading Big Sur for the first time when we interviewed her. “I really enjoyed all of Big Sur. I thought it was a very, very- well-written book. I liked it a lot better than I did On the Road, tell you the truth. This is the work of a mature writer, he’s looking back at something — and he’s, as much as he loves his run on sentences and his over use of paragraphs, which is a style that, well is very catching, I caught myself using it in emails while I was reading this book!”
