In the mid-1960s, Oklahoma adolescent Susan Eloise Hinton had a problem with books available to her. “Realistic teenage fiction didn’t exist,” she claimed. “If you didn’t want to read ‘Mary Jane Goes to the Prom,’ there was nothing to read. I wanted to write something that dealt with what I saw kids really doing.”
The book that Hinton wrote for herself ended up becoming something for millions of others to read and think about while also struggling to navigate the often-turbulent waters of teen society that sweep students through their hectic high school years.
Born in 1948, the older daughter of a Tulsa door-to-door salesman and a factory worker, Hinton began composing her novel when she was 15 and completed it a year later. Much of it was written in the library at Will Rogers High School, where she was an apathetic student. (Hinton earned a D in a creative writing class.)…