On July 22, 1950, Susan Eloise Hinton was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Growing up in such a small town, there was not much for a young girl like Hinton to do, so her interests revolved around reading, writing, and horses. Hinton noticed that there were not many books that she wanted to read. Too many books were about perfect characters with perfect lives; she wanted characters that were real, with real problems. After giving up her dream of being a cattle rancher, Hinton thought of herself becoming a writer. Her father died of cancer when she was seventeen, and she turned to writing as a coping mechanism. It was then that she fully dedicated herself to writing. She wrote the first draft of The Outsiders in 1965 and published the final manuscript
