TULSA, Okla. -- Beyond its cluster of office towers, Tulsa is a city built close to the ground, a broad clash of neighborhoods you can tell apart by how the grass grows, bright and trim as a putting green in the richer sections, pale and shaggy in the poorer spots.
Tulsa native S.E. Hinton, a cult figure for 40 years since the publication of "The Outsiders," knows the difference between the wild and the well-kept lawn. Her multimillion-selling book not only helped establish the young adult novel but remains a classic story of gangs at knife's edge.
Once a teen sensation who wrote her most famous book while still in high school, Hinton is now 59, a dry-witted, sad-eyed woman wearing jeans and sneakers for a recent interview. As a child, she dreamed of writing a book she wanted to read, a novel that told the truth about how kids think. Forty years later, a lot of young people still think she succeeded.
"I get letters from all over the world, saying, 'It changed my life.' Who am I to change somebody's life? It's not me. It's in the book," she says. "If people want to find me, they can. They'll see a middle-aged woman wandering around the grocery store, looking to see what to buy for dinner."
Hinton drove around Tulsa with a reporter on a recent afternoon, pointing out the estates of former oil barons, an overpass where young people were routinely beaten up and the movie theater mentioned at the beginning of "The Outsiders." She is devoted to Tulsa, with its "bumps, booms and busts," typical of an oil economy. The restaurants are great -- eating out is a favorite pastime -- there's room to ride her horses, and people both like her and leave her alone.
A 40th-anniversary edition of "The Outsiders" has just been published, and Hinton, who would rather write than talk about writing, sat and chatted in the library of Will Rogers High School, the very room where she worked on parts of her novel.
"I was exhilarated," she recalls about that time. "I remember the buzz, the feeling like you're burning up."
As a student, Hinton once received a "D" in creative writing, but she is now an honored alumna of Will Rogers High School, her picture displayed behind a glass case to the right of the library, along with such other notables as musician David Gates and singer Anita Bryant. Hinton rarely goes to the high school, but students apparently still like her books enough to steal them, according to librarian Carrie Fleharty.
