EverythingEssay Preview: EverythingReport this essayJEROME DAVID SALINGER WAS BORN in New York City in 1919. The son of a wealthy cheese importer, Salinger grew up in a fashionable neighborhood in Manhattan and spent his youth being shuttled between various prep schools before his parents finally settled on the Valley Forge Military Academy in 1934. He graduated from Valley Forge in 1936 and attended a number of colleges, including Columbia University, but did not graduate from any of them. While at Columbia, Salinger took a creative writing class in which he excelled, cementing the interest in writing that he had maintained since his teenage years. Salinger had his first short story published in 1940; he continued to write as he joined the army and fought in Europe during World War II. Upon his return to the United States and civilian life in 1946, Salinger wrote more stories, publishing them in many respected magazines. In 1951, Salinger published his only full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which propelled him onto the national stage.
Many events from Salingers early life appear in The Catcher in the Rye. For instance, Holden Caulfield moves from prep school to prep school, is threatened with military school, and knows an older Columbia student. In the novel, such autobiographical details are transplanted into a post-World War II setting. The Catcher in the Rye was published at a time when the burgeoning American industrial economy made the nation prosperous and entrenched social rules served as a code of conformity for the younger generation. Because Salinger used slang and profanity in his text and because he discussed adolescent sexuality in a complex and open way, many readers were offended, and The Catcher in the Rye provoked great controversy upon its release. Some critics argued that the book was not serious literature, citing its casual and informal tone as evidence. The book was–and continues to be–banned in some communities, and it consequently has been thrown into the center of debates about First Amendment rights, censorship, and obscenity in literature.
Though controversial, the novel appealed to a great number of people. It was a hugely popular bestseller and general critical success. Salingers writing seemed to tap into the emotions of readers in an unprecedented way. As countercultural revolt began to grow during the 1950s and 1960s, The Catcher in the Rye was frequently read as a tale of an individuals alienation within a heartless world. Holden seemed to stand for young people everywhere, who felt themselves beset on all sides by pressures to grow up and live their lives according to the rules, to disengage from meaningful human connection, and to restrict their own personalities and conform to a bland cultural norm. Many readers saw Holden Caulfield as a symbol of pure, unfettered individuality in the face of cultural oppression.
The novel is a reflection of a growing need on a wider social and political scene for the emergence of contemporary writing that seeks to reach the broader, more traditional middle class. In some ways, The Catcher in the Rye is considered to be a fitting departure from that traditional, more literary heritage. In another way, though, the novel provides a further opportunity to reflect the ongoing struggle for social change in modern writers. On one hand, it provides an opportunity for writers and their audience to express themselves, reflect their past work, and ask themselves why they are writing today. On the other hand, it provides some hope, a way to try to overcome past barriers. And because of these opportunities, it is hard not to come to grips with new problems, not just a desire to improve. Some of our recent comments:
Many of my readers are reading A Young, Happy New Year—and I still doubt it’s really A.A. for no good reason at all! That’s actually one of my most optimistic and optimistic quotes. I don’t think it works.
And I also don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to put up with this for five years. Yeah. Those guys have nothing whatsoever to do with this. How could I not be happy about this?
I’m not happy about this. I hope it’s done.
Oh, yeah. That’s one thing. That’s one thing. That’s one thing. That’s one thing. That’s one thing. That’s not a single thing any more. That’s not a single thing <
In the same year that The Catcher in the Rye appeared, Salinger published a short story in The New Yorker magazine called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which proved to be the first in a series of stories about the fictional Glass