[S. E. Hinton] was in her teens when she wrote The Outsiders …, a novel of violence and feuding between greasers and socialites. The book is technically remarkable for so young a writer; its background appears authentic; but true feeling is hopelessly entangled with false, bad-film sentimentality, and the plot is creakingly unbelievable. It may be noted that, just as slum children in novels by middle-class writers can easily be nice middle-class children under the skin, so the greasers in this book by 'a seventeen-year-old whose best friends are greasers' sometimes look like sheep in wolves' clothing. (p. 295)

John Rowe Townsend, "How Young Is an Adult?" in his Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children's Literature, revised edition, J. B. Lippincott, Publishers, 1974, pp. 291-300.∗