S. E. Hinton
American writer
Susan Eloise Hinton (born July 22, 1948) is an American writer best known for her young-adult novels (YA) set in Oklahoma, especially The Outsiders (1967), which she wrote during high school. Hinton is credited with introducing the YA genre. She graduated from the University of Tulsa.
In 1988, she received the inaugural Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her cumulative contribution in writing for teens.
Early life
Susan Eloise Hinton was born on July 22, 1948 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, Grady, was a door-to-door salesman, and her mother, Lillian, was a factory worker. Lillian was physically and emotionally abusive, throwing one of Hinton's early manuscripts in a trash burner (though she allowed her to rescue them), and Hinton described Grady as "an extremely cold man."
Growing up, she and her family attended a "fundamentalist, hellfire and brimstone" church, which she disliked deeply and turned her away from religion as an adult. Grady developed a brain tumor when Hinton was 15 and died when she was in her junior year of high school.
Career
1960s: The Outsiders
While still in her teens, Hinton wrote The Outsiders, her first and most popular novel, set in Oklahoma in the 1960s. She began writing it in 1965.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “S. E. Hinton” as american writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117425. VIAF identifies the subject as 39583594. The Library of Congress control number is n79063871. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1967, 1988 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “S. E. Hinton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.