Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye, published by Little, Brown in Boston on July 16, 1951, is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old who has been expelled from his prep school, Pencey. Over about two days before Christmas he drifts around New York City, avoiding his parents, meeting old teachers and strangers, and dreaming of protecting children from falling into adulthood, as a catcher in a field of rye. He tells it from a rest home, in a voice full of slang and the word 'phony'.¹²

J. D. Salinger, born in Manhattan in 1919, had published short stories about Holden in The New Yorker in the 1940s. He served in the Second World War, landing on D-Day, and is said to have carried early chapters with him. The novel's confessional first-person style followed the American tradition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and it captured postwar anxiety and a sense of conformity. Its title comes from a mishearing of a line of Robert Burns, which Holden recites.²

Reviews were generally good, and it became a bestseller and a fixture of school reading lists. It has also been among the most frequently banned or challenged books in American schools for its language and themes. It has sold more than 60 million copies. Salinger withdrew from public life, stopped publishing after 1965 and refused to allow a film adaptation. The novel's voice influenced generations of writers of youth and coming-of-age fiction, and Holden Caulfield is one of the best-known characters in American writing.¹²