She has one younger sister, Beverly. Her father, Grady P. Hinton, to whom she was very close, died when she was a junior in high school. His death undoubtedly influenced the writing of
The Outsiders, for which she was presented a publisher's contract on the day of her graduation from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa.
Several facts about The Outsiders— that it was written by a teenager from a teenager's perspective, that it was written by a young woman in the firstperson voice of a young man, and that it deals with a teenage underworld of gangs, delinquency, and violence —all added to its notoriety and popularity. Within a relatively short time the book had sold more than four million copies in the United States. The fame was difficult for Hinton, a shy, nonjoining outsider herself, to handle, and she suffered writer's block, unable to write even a letter, for years afterwards. "Before it was published I thought I knew how to write. Afterwards I knew I couldn't. I was a teen-age writer, which is similar to being a teen-age werewolf, only it doesn't last as long," Hinton wrote in an autobiographical sketch for The Fourth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators (1978).
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