Linden Dalecki is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. He writes novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s for child

Child

Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority...

ren and young adults.

Writing

His first novel, Kid B, is set in the world of Texas hip-hop and was influenced by S. E. Hinton

S. E. Hinton

Susan Eloise Hinton is an American author best known for her young adult novel The Outsiders.While still in her teens, Hinton became a household name as the author of The Outsiders, her first and most popular novel, set in Oklahoma in the 1960s. She began writing it in 1965...

's The Outsiders

The Outsiders (novel)

The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel based in 1965 by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel, but did most of the work when she was sixteen and a junior in high school. Hinton was 18 when the book was published...

. The book is narrated in the first-person by the title character "Kid B" whose birth name is Breslin Kirwin.

By following two conflicting groups of teen boys, the themes explored by Dalecki are similar to those in The Outsiders

The Outsiders (novel)

The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel based in 1965 by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel, but did most of the work when she was sixteen and a junior in high school. Hinton was 18 when the book was published...

(1967), such as brotherly love (or hate as the case may be), friendship, and coming-of-age. But unlike The Outsiders, in the milieu of Kid B the groups are from similar socio-economic backgrounds (the working class

Working class

Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...

) and though there is some gang

Gang

A gang is a group of people who, through the organization, formation, and establishment of an assemblage, share a common identity. In current usage it typically denotes a criminal organization or else a criminal affiliation. In early usage, the word gang referred to a group of workmen...

 activity most of the conflict revolves around breakdance competition and other aspects of hip hop

Hip hop

Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic culture that originated in African-American and Latino communities during the 1970s in New York City, specifically the Bronx. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of hip hop culture: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti writing...

.

Kid B evolved from Dalecki's award-winning short story, "The B-Boys of Beaumont".

External links

• http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A196867 The B-Boys of Beaumont short story
• http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=497846 Kid B description on Houghton Mifflin site
• Texas B-Boy Link