It’s author S.E. Hinton’s birthday. Born on this day in 1948, Hinton wrote a lot of those coming-of-age novels we read in high school including, Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, That Was Then, This Is Now, Tex, and so on. While Ms. Hinton prefers wine, if her Twitter feed is to be believed, her rebellious teenagers in her books (and the later movies) tended to drink cheap beer when they decided it was time to get into some trouble. She got some heat from the usual scolds for depicting underage drinking, but hey, S.E. grew up poor and wild so she knew from what she wrote and refused to sugarcoat it. She wrote the Outsiders while she was still in high school doing exactly what those kids were doing. And, come on, how many of us waited until we were of legal age to have a taste of the ambrosia? Not me, and I’ll bet not you either.
