July 16: The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published on this date in 1951. Jerome David’s Salinger’s mother was actually of mixed European descent and not Jewish, but he did not know as much until after his bar mitsve. Salinger was a drop-out from NYU and working in Vienna when the Nazis took over (one of the first unpublished stories he wrote back in the U.S. was “I Went to School with Adolf Hitler”). He saw combat and worked in military intelligence during World War II, and was among the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp. By the late 1940s he was a practicing Buddhist and a published short story writer. His semi-autobiographical Catcher, narrated by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, was an immediate hit and still sells about 250,000 copies each year, despite numerous censorship campaigns mounted over the decades against it. Soon after achieving sudden fame, Salinger dropped out of public view and remained a famous recluse and a highly unproductive writer until his death in 2010.
“. . . the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed.” —Ian Hamilton