Writer S.E. Hinton, best known for her young adult novel The

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 million-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 it’s “bumps, booms and busts,” the luck of an oil economy.

A 40th anniversary edition of “The Outsiders” has just been published and Hinton, who would rather write than talk about writing, also 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, 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.

“I can’t keep them on the shelves,” she says with a laugh. “The kids keep taking them out and ‘forgetting’ to bring them back.”

Knowing when to stop

“The Outsiders” is the raw, but hopeful story of rival gangs that features narrator Ponyboy Curtis, the bookish greaser who can quote Robert Frost; macho Dallas Winston, blue eyes “blazing ice, cold with a hatred of the whole world”; and little Johnny Cade, a “dark puppy that has been kicked too many times.”

“I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows,” Hinton wrote in the novel. “Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better.”

Her novel is known to millions, but Hinton’s original audience was herself. She had long felt that popular culture offered nothing to remind of her own life, not such novels as “The Catcher in the Rye” (Holden Caufield needs a “good spanking,” she says with a laugh), not the movies or even rock ‘n’ rollers like Elvis Presley, a favorite of the greasers.

She started at age 15 and spent a year and a half working on the book, saying that the hardest part was knowing when to stop. Having taught herself to type because she couldn’t read her own handwriting, she typed out the first draft, 40 pages, single-spaced.

Hinton didn’t even think of publishing the book until the mother of one of her friends read the manuscript and liked it enough to contact an agent based in New York. Viking signed her up, for “a small advance,” and with a suggestion that she call herself S.E. in print, so male critics wouldn’t be turned off by a woman writer.

Curiosity piece

“The Outsiders” was published in 1967, but greeted more as a curiosity than a breakthrough. “Can sincerity overcome cliches?” began a brief New York Times review by Thomas Fleming. “In this book by a now 17-year-old author, it almost does the trick.”

“It was overemotional, over the top, melodramatic,” Hinton acknowledges. “But its vices were its virtues, because kids feel that way.”

Hinton’s first royalty check was $10, she says, and at one point “The Outsiders” was in danger of going out of print. But librarians and teachers made it a best-seller, and a landmark, a turning point in how literature was presented to students.

“Before ‘The Outsiders,’ textbooks were used for English classes. I remember going to American Library Association conferences and they were clamoring for something different. We realized there was a real market for books such as ‘The Outsiders,”‘ says Ron Beuhl, a longtime friend of Hinton’s who worked with her in the 1970s when he was a publisher at Dell and specialized in young adult paperbacks.

According to Viking, a division of Penguin Group USA, “The Outsiders” has sold more than 13 million copies and still sells more than 500,000 a year.

Sudden fame

For Hinton, fame at any speed was too sudden. She suffered from writer’s block, needing three years to complete her next novel, “That Was Then, This Is Now,” another story of street life in Tulsa that included Ponyboy as a minor character. Other novels, also in and around Tulsa, include “Tex,” “Rumble Fish” and “Taming the Star Runner.”

Hinton has been married since 1970 to her college sweetheart, mathematician and computer scientist David Inhofe (“He doesn’t read, and I can’t add,” she jokes), and they have a son, Nick, now in his 20s. Hinton may be a sage to many adolescents, but even the author of “The Outsiders” was not spared the disapproval of her own teenager.

“It was so strange because the three of us were so compatible, going to restaurants and falling out of our chairs, laughing,” she recalls. “When he became a teenager, I was dumbfounded by the hostility. It was like someone shut off the light switch. I was really hurt. You had to walk on tippy-toes.”

A Ponyboy return?

Hinton still dreams about her old characters, and says it would be a “piece of cake” to bring back Ponyboy, but “I couldn’t capture the intensity. It would be a letdown.” Instead, she’s working on a “paranormal suspense” story and prefers history books to children’s stories. One fictional genre she knows enough about to despise: chick lit.

“It’s just another version of ‘Mary Jane goes to the prom,”‘ she says. “It’s all about the boys.”