The Catcher in the Rye - ALL-TIME 100 Novels - TIME

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Author: J.D. Salinger


No matter how many high school English teachers try to domesticate The Catcher in the Rye in class, it will never lose its satirical edge. When Holden Caulfield learns he's going to be kicked out of yet another private school, he bails in the middle of the night ("Sleep tight, ya morons!" he yells) and heads to New York City to bum around for a few days—hitting on girls, thinking about his dead brother, worrying about where the ducks go in the wintertime—before he deals with his parents. The time passes in an agony of anhedonia that transcends the merely adolescent: It's a permanent reminder of the sweetness of childhood, the hypocrisy of the adult world, and the strange no-man's-land that lies in between.—L.G.

From the TIME Archive:
Some of my best friends are children,' says Jerome David Salinger, 32. 'In fact, all of my best friends are children.'
—TIME Magazine, Jul. 16, 1951 (Read This Review)

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