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The Catcher in the Rye » (~)

Book cover image of The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Authors: J. D. Salinger
ISBN-13: 9780316769174, ISBN-10: 0316769177
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Date Published: January 2001
Edition: ~

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Author Biography: J. D. Salinger

His cloistered lifestyle and limited output have not prevented readers and writers from lionizing J. D. Salinger. With one-of-a-kind stories and the classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, he captured, with wit and poignance, a growing malaise in post-war America.

Book Synopsis

Anyone who has read J. D. Salinger's New Yorker stories - particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme - With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.

Table of Contents


Introduction     7
Biographical Sketch     9
The Story Behind the Story     16
List of Characters     21
Summary and Analysis     25
Critical Views     43
Carl F. Strauch on The Complexity of Holden's Character     43
Robert M. Slabey on Christian Themes and Symbols     47
Jonathan Baumbach on Spirituality     50
John M. Howell on T.S. Eliot's Influence     54
Warren French on Holden's Search for Tranquility     60
Duane Edwards on Holden as the Unreliable Narrator     64
Gerald Rosen on the Relevance of Buddhism     69
Edwin Haviland Miller on Mourning Allie Caulfield     74
Christopher Brookeman on Cultural Codes at Pencey Prep     78
Sanford Pinsker on the Protagonist-Narrator     82
Paul Alexander on Inventing Holden Caulfield     86
Pamela Hunt Steinle on Holden as a Version of the American Adam     89
Matt Evertson on Holden Caulfield's Longing to Construct a New Home     94
Yasuhiro Takeuchi on the Carnivalesque     99
Works by J.D. Salinger     106
Annotated Bibliography     107
Contributors     117
Acknowledgments     120
Index     123

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