News

“S.E. Hinton is a girl?” my friend’s husband, incredulous, asked me last weekend. It wasn’t the first time. Given the fact that the author’s “The Outsiders,” her iconic work, is still read in classrooms across the country, and that her particulars—she published the work when she was 17 as, yes, a girl—are splashed on nearly every copy, it’s a perplexingly enduring question. Perhaps for readers of any age it’s still difficult to believe that this profoundly diligent explorer of male adolescence, the woman who brought philosophizing, switchblade-bearing toughs with way too much hair oil and free time onto every teenager’s bookshelf, probably did it in a bra…

“The brotherhood of S.E. Hinton” (The Chicago Tribune, May 2008)