The success of The Outsiders enabled Hinton to attend the University of Tulsa where she earned a degree in education in 1970. However, during her student teaching, she decided that she did not have the physical stamina to be a teacher. She found herself teaching all day and then worrying about the kids all night.
Hinton did meet her future husband, David Inhofe, in a freshman biology class, and it was due to him that she finished her second book, That Was Then, This is Now. Hinton was suffering from writer's block, and he forced her to write two pages a day. If she failed to produce two pages during the day, they wouldn't go out that night. They were married in 1970, and That Was Then, This is Now was published in 1971.
