How does an author become an author? For S E Hinton, the choice was easy -- she wrote her first book, 'The Outsiders,' as a teenager, when she couldn't find anything that she wanted to read.

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50 years ago, a 16 year old from Oklahoma named Susan Eloise Hinton published her first book. She’d started writing it when she was 14, and it became the best selling young adult novel of all time. I began writing […]

Susan Eloise Hinton (born July 22, 1948) is an American writer best known for her young-adult novels set in Oklahoma, especially The Outsiders, which she wrote during high school. For her cumulative contribution to young-adult literature she received the inaugural Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1988.