[US Navy Vet]

And how many of this guy’s book would have been sold if the “Public School” establishment would not have bought them by the millions.

[Borges]

Salinger’s books were bestsellers upon publication.

[Taft in '52]

And how many of this guy’s books would have been sold if the “Public School” establishment would not have bought them by the millions.

When I attended a public high school in the '60's, we read Homer and Shakespeare as freshmen and Dostoevskii, Orwell, Dickens and Victor Hugo as sophomores. As juniors, we read American authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Stephen Crane, Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald.

I consider myself lucky to have been exposed to great and near-great literature. It seems to have been the next generation that was assigned books like Catcher in the Rye