This story about a brave young girl taming her horse is told in the third person. Taming the Star Runner was book number five and a departure from her usual story-telling technique. In 1982, Disney Studios released Tex, and Hinton agreed to the movie deal with the condition that her horse got to play the lead horse in the movie. Hinton's next book, Tex, published in 1980, is about two delinquent brothers left on their own by a rambling father. Rumble Fish is a story of two brothers, Rusty-James and Motorcycle Boy, who are almost always there for each other. She was inspired to write this book from a saved 1967 magazine photo of a boy on a motorcycle. Rumble Fish, published in 1975, contains Hinton's most complex character, Motorcycle Boy. However, they find their lives pulling apart due to involvement with girls, gangs, and drugs. It is about two 16-year-old friends, Mark and Byron, who are like brothers. Hinton considers her second book, That Was Then, This Is Now, to be better written than The Outsiders. They were married in 1970, and That Was Then, This is Now was published in 1971. If she failed to produce two pages during the day, they wouldn't go out that night. Hinton was suffering from writer's block, and he forced her to write two pages a day. Hinton did meet her future husband, David Inhofe, in a freshman biology class, and it was due to him that she finished her second book, That Was Then, This is Now. She found herself teaching all day and then worrying about the kids all night. However, during her student teaching, she decided that she did not have the physical stamina to be a teacher. The success of The Outsiders enabled Hinton to attend the University of Tulsa where she earned a degree in education in 1970. Her mother's reaction to the novel was shock she said, 'Susie, where did you pick up all of this?' Although she also had friends who were Socs, she definitely did not consider herself a part of that group. She has stated that her biggest compliment was that her greaser friends liked the book.

Hinton was not a member of a gang when she wrote The Outsiders, but she was a friend to many greasers. The publisher - believing that the book would have more credibility if people assumed that a male had written it - advised her to use her initials, S. She began writing the first draft of the novel when she was 15, and writing and rewriting took a year and a half before she was happy with the final copy. The Outsiders was published in 1967, when Hinton was only 17 years old and attending Will Rogers High School.

Susan Eloise Hinton was born in 1950 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The outsiders se