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The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has just flunked out of his third private boarding school. Unwilling to remain at school until the end of the term, Holden runs away, returning to New York City, his hometown. He does not contact his parents there, but instead drifts around the city for two days. The bulk of the novel is an account, at once hilariously funny and tragically moving, of Holden's adventures in Manhattan. These include disillusioning encounters with two nuns, a suave ex-schoolmate, an old girlfriend, a prostitute named Sunny, and a sympathetic former teacher. Finally, drawn by his affection for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe, Holden abandons his spree and returns home.
Salinger's depiction of Holden Caulfield is considered one of the most convincing portrayals of an adolescent in literature. Intelligent, sensitive, and imaginative, Holden desires acceptance into the adult world even as he is sickened and obsessed by what he regards as its "phonies," including his teachers, parents, and his older brother, who is a screenwriter in California. For all his surface toughness, Holden is painfully idealistic and longs for a moral purpose in life. He tells Phoebe that he wants to be “the catcher in the rye”—the defender of childhood innocence—who would stand in a field of rye where thousands of children are playing and “catch anybody if they start to go over the cliff.” The book remains a popular bestseller.
Many of Salinger’s early short stories have never been published in book form. Nine Stories, a 1953 anthology of his stories, won great critical acclaim. Reviewing it for the New York Times, novelist Eudora Welty praised Salinger's writing as “original, first-rate, serious and beautiful.” In one of the stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the author introduces the fictional Glass family, an Irish-Jewish New York family with seven children. The family's saga, colored by the suicide of the precocious eldest son, Seymour, and informed by Salinger's growing interest in Zen Buddhism, would become the center of the writer's work during the next decade.
The title characters of the twin novellas Franny and Zooey (1961) are Glass children. Franny is a high-strung college student who feels alienated from the academic world in her desperate search for spiritual meaning in life. Her brother Zooey, by contrast, is a charming and warm, easygoing television actor who has made his peace with the corruption he finds in the world. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), another pair of novellas published as a single volume, are both narrated by Franny and Zooey's older brother Buddy, a writer. Salinger has described Buddy as his alter ego. All of the Glass family stories originally appeared in The New Yorker, the final one (“Hapworth 16, 1924”) in 1965. He has not published anything since.
The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has just flunked out of his third private boarding school. Unwilling to remain at school until the end of [next page]