And, of course, there are outsiders, because that's where Hinton still lands, uneasy even when her place is in the spotlight as an aging teen icon.

"But frankly," she says, gripping the arms of her chair as she prepares for an onslaught of the kind of attention she'd prefer to avoid, "I'm a little too old for word of mouth."

Blazing a trail

She was a mere kid, a tomboy whose father had just died from a brain tumor, when word of mouth about "The Outsiders" quietly upended teen publishing.

Hinton started the book at age 15 in reaction to the social rivalries on the streets of Tulsa, where she grew up, and at Will Rogers High School. No one else was writing about the "socs" and the "greasers," the haves and the have-nots, the injustice that stunned her.

"She really was the first author who came along and wrote about something other than sweet little middle-class children," says Pamela Spencer Holley, president-elect of the Young Adult Library Service Association, a branch of the American Library Association. "Everything else that followed has been because of her."

Published in 1967, the book has sold more than 10 million copies and ranks second on Publisher Weekly's list of all-time best-selling children's books. Francis Ford Coppola directed the 1983 film version.

Teachers made it required reading, and generations came to know Hinton through street-wise characters named Johnny, Ponyboy and Dallas, even if they didn't know the S.E. stood for Susan Eloise. "Dear Mr. Hinton": Fan mail still mistakenly addresses the woman who has always found it easiest to write in the voice of a young man.

Three other teen novels, "Tex," "Rumble Fish," and "That Was Then, This Is Now," likewise led to movies. Hinton was involved in the films, even helping scout locations from the hangouts and haunts that inspired her books. She recalls one freezing day at the drive-in where she once saw movies for 25 cents. Coppola's video camera broke, and they took shelter in the women's restroom to work on it.

"I kept thinking, 'I'm here in the ladies room of the Admiral Twin Drive-In watching Francis Coppola poke his camera with a Swiss Army knife. This is so surrealistic.' "

Her chair always sat next to Coppola's. On the movie sets, Hinton says, she finally felt like she fit in.

'I can't write a sequel.'

Young fans have begged for a sequel to "The Outsiders," but by the mid-1980s, the emotions Hinton had poured into her books were going into to raising her young son. She wrote two children's books instead.

Hinton, who had been seized by writer's block after being deemed "The Voice of the Youth" with "The Outsiders," says "Hawkes Harbor" was not the product of a struggle to produce more teen fiction.

Hinton knew she could never recapture the raw emotions that made "The Outsiders" work. And as her son became a teenager, she found she lacked the sympathy for teens that made her early stories resonate.

"If I tried to write it now, when I'm a much better writer, I'd ruin it," she says. "They think I'm being mean when I say, 'No, I won't write a sequel.' But I need to change that to, 'No, I can't write a sequel.' "

Greasers and socs may be gone, but kids still write Hinton to tell her the struggle goes on. "Punks or preppies -- the names and the uniforms change every five years," she says.

She is halfway into her 50s now -- old enough not to be specific when asked for her age. The years have softened her face, but her voice rumbles with the grit of the teens she portrayed. There's something like wariness in her enormous eyes. She's funny, but her humor has bite.

"I don't do a big toothy grin," she warns a photographer who is about to ruin the anonymity she covets when she hunts the aisles of her grocery store for dinner and toilet paper.

Hinton is proud of her teen novels and hates that she can't respond to the fan mail. But that would have kept her from moving on, and she had to move on. She wanted adventure. She wanted freedom from a genre. She wanted "to remember how much fun it used to be writing" and do it without having to top anything.

Horses are her longtime love, and Hinton says when her riding goes well, so does her writing. An astrologer told her that's because the same planets govern pleasure and discipline.

"In the last couple of years I wanted to go trail riding because I wanted outside the ring," she says. "Now looking at it, I wanted outside the ring in my book. I was just so bored with the ring."

She bought a trail horse, a paint named Sage. She's working on a series of short stories and considers them some of her best work. And she's pondering a new book that's out of the ring and off the trail.

A Western, she says, a book maybe for the young and old.

* story and images taken from CNN.com