Susan Eloise Hinton was a shy girl who grew up in Tulsa Oklahoma, where there was a limited amount of things for girls to do, so she began reading and writing. At first she wanted to become a cattle rancher, but she developed an ambition for writing. She was a private person because she was uncomfortable talking about her personal life. Her favorite authors were: Jane Austen, Mary Renault, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Shirley Jackson. They also influenced her. She also liked writing horseback riding and taking classes at the University of Tulsa. Her first stories were about cowboys, gun fighting, and horses. She loved reading, but she didn’t like the literature that written for teenagers. Hinton was the most successful novelist for junior high…show more content… Real life and her experiences in her life was an inspiration for her writings. Her dissatisfaction of other teen books inspired her to write her novel “The Outsiders”, which was published by Viking in 1967. This book gave her a lot of fame and pressure. She became known as “ The Voice of the Youth.” Her pressure and publicity resulted in a three year long writer’s block. Because she was depressed all the time her husband broke this block by making her write two pages a day for her book “That was Then, This is Now” until it was finished. This book was more developed than “The Outsiders” and was published in 1971.
She received an inaugural Margaret Edwards award from the American Library Association for her contribution of writing for teens in 1988. She was the first to receive the YASD/SLJ Author’s Achievement Award, given by the Young Adult Services Division of the American Library Association and School Library Journal. Hinton deviated from writing teen fiction books to writing books for children as a reflection of her family, which was very important to…show more content… The next night Pony, Dallas, and Johnny goes to the drive-in theater and meets two of the Socs girls. They begin to talk, Ponyboy realizes that Socs and Greasers have some of the same problems and they have things in common. The Socs finds out the Greasers are talking to their girls, the greasers leave to prevent a fight. The rising action starts when Johnny kills Bob in the park and Ponyboy and Johnny saves the children from the church fire. The climax is when the police shoot Dallas and Johnny dies. The resolution is when Pony boy gets an encouraging letter from Johnny, he goes to court, gets found innocent of misconduct and he writes a letter for his English