When was catcher in rye published

For Chrissake. That killed me. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. He seems and this is why his character can be so addictive to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life. One goal of education is to teach people to want the rewards life has to offer, but another goal is to teach them a modest degree of contempt for those rewards, too. That it might end up on the syllabus for ninth-grade English was probably close to the last thing Salinger had in mind when he wrote the book.

So, presumably, is Hamlet. But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it.

What drew Salinger to this plot? The story was bought by The New Yorker but not published until And there are characters named Holden Caulfield in other stories that Salinger produced in the mid-forties. Salinger spent most of the war with the 4th Infantry Division, where he was in a counter-intelligence unit.

The 4th Division suffered terrible casualties in those engagements, and Salinger, by his own account, in letters he wrote at the time, was traumatized. He fought for eleven months during the advance on Berlin, and by the summer of , after the German surrender, he seems to have had a nervous breakdown.

He checked himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg. Seymour is a war casualty. It is as a hero of that culture that Holden Caulfield has survived. And it is not a celebration of youth.

It is a book about loss and a world gone wrong. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Salinger had disappeared down his New Hampshire rabbit hole. They are not thrown into a state of higher intensity by trauma or by grief. They are just in a state of higher intensity. There is no suggestion of pregnancy. After , Salinger stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense. He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control.

His presence began to dissolve into the world of his creation. He let the puppets take over the theatre. There are many more. But other writers have tried, at least one in every decade since it appeared. The bar is set a good deal higher than that, and the reason has to do with the Salinger mystique.

In his avidity to find them, he pokes in the grass around the lagoon, to see if they are sleeping there, and nearly falls in the water. No ducks. This Phoebe is one of the most exquisitely created and engaging children in any novel. They are all about an attractive girl detective named Hazle Weatherfield. As befits an author, Phoebe has numberless notebooks. Before Holden wakes Phoebe, he has a look at her notebooks and her schoolbooks.

Holden wakes Phoebe. She hits him with her fist. This accusation, in which Holden recognizes that there is a fundamental truth, also depresses him. He tries desperately to justify himself. He enumerates things and people he does like—his brother Allie, for instance. Phoebe replies sagely that it is easy to like people who are in Heaven. Holden, miserable, cannot marshal all his likes. There was, he remembers, a frail boy who was so bullied by some thug schoolmates that he jumped out of a window to escape them.

A teacher, Mr. Near Phoebe, Holden begins to feel better. They turn on the radio and dance. Then, when Holden is about to leave, she gives him her Christmas money. She was sitting way up in bed.

She looked so pretty. Everybody, says Holden, accuses him of acting twelve years old. It is his self-communings that are tragic and touching—a dark whirlpool churning fiercely below the unflagging hilarity of his surface activities.

It is the vision of an innocent. He has a hunger for stability. It was the reason Keats liked the suspended attitudes of the figures on the Grecian urn. And yet there is an exhilaration, an immense relief in the final scene of this novel, at the Central Park carrousel with Phoebe. One day, he will probably find himself in the mood to call up Jane. He may even, someday, write a novel. I would like to read it. In retrospect, it might be easy to assume that The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate smash hit, critically and commercially, when it was published by Little, Brown and Company on July 16, In fact, the reviews were mixed.

Although the book sold well, it was not an overwhelming sensation and never reached number one on the best-seller lists.

The unusual thing about Salinger's first novel is its staying power. Many of the novel's early reviews were favorable. On July 14, , the Saturday Review praised the work as "remarkable" and "absorbing.

Behrman wrote an unusually long and strong review August 11, , stressing the personal attraction of Phoebe and Holden as characters.

The Book-of-the-Month Club selected the novel as a summer alternate, assuring significant sales and widespread attention. In the Book-of-the-Month Club News July , its large membership received a very positive review by the respected literary critic Clifton Fadiman, including one of the most widely quoted early comments on Holden Caulfield: "[T]hat rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper, and the imagination.

Other critics hedged their bets. An unsigned review in the July 15, , Booklist found the work "imaginative" but warned of "coarse language. Roth "highly recommended" the novel but warned that it "may be a shock to many parents" and should be thought of as strictly adult reading.

The reviewer for the Nation September 1, liked parts of the story but generally thought it was "predictable and boring. Goodman of the New Republic July 16, rated the final carrousel scene "as good as anything that Salinger has written" but concluded that "the book as a whole is disappointing"; there was just too much of Holden in the book for her. In the August Atlantic Monthly , Harvey Breit considered the work as a "summer novel" and found it to be a "near miss" in effectiveness.

Attempting to review the novel in the voice of its narrator, he offered such strained turns as, "This Salinger, he's a short-story guy.