S.E. Hinton: Still Gold

Susie Hinton was a 16-year-old high-schooler, barely passing English class, when she sold her first novel, The Outsiders, which explores the class struggle of a pack of poor teenage boys. The book, based loosely on her group of friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and published in 1967, went on to sell over 14 million copies and is required reading at most middle schools. Her other works include young-adult reads Tex, Rumble Fish and That Was Then, This Is Now.

In 1983, under the helm of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Susie's first book was turned into a movie, starring a cast of up-and-comers like Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe and Matt Dillon. Decades later, the popular film has been rereleased with 22 minutes of original footage added to make it more true to the book. On the eve of the DVD release, we sat down with the press-shy Hinton, now a married mother of a college-age son, to talk about the story behind the book, the crazy fan mail she still gets and how she literally made Tom Cruise vomit.

Is it true your publisher made you abbreviate your name because they thought a female author would make the book a hard sell?
Initially, it was to fool the first reviewers. They thought: They'll pick it up, see what it's about and think a girl couldn't have written it. After it came out, obviously I did publicity and it wasn't a big dark secret or anything. But it worked because all the early reviews said: "This young man has written this book..."

Talk about what inspired the story. Your friend got jumped...
Writing was always something I enjoyed. But when I was in high school, there was really nothing to read ‑- no young-adult market. The books were like Mary Jane Goes to the Prom. They were so unrealistic. So when my friend got beaten up, I wrote a short story that was originally about 40 typed pages. And I kept writing it over and over. The version the publisher saw was my third time through it.

Unbelievably, the year you wrote the book, you got a D in creative writing.
That takes away from the great English teachers I had, but it's true. The year I was writing Outsiders, I wasn't paying attention to my class work. Then I found out that publishers don't count off for spelling [laughs]. I owe that class something, though ‑- one day I was in class, bored, and I was thumbing through a book and came across the Robert Frost poem ["Nothing Gold Can Stay"]. I thought: This says what I'm trying to say in the book. So I put it in the book.