Susan Eloise Hinton, who was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, July 22, 1948, and first began writing in her junior year at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa.

She was inspired to write The Outsiders, her first and most popular novel, because of the two divided gangs 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 8 million copies.^[1]Hinton's publisher suggested she use her initials instead of her first name so that male reviewers would not ignore the novel for having been written by a female