Posted on 07/14/2026 10:39:13 AM PDT by Borges
On July 16, “The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger, will turn 75. Commemorating such a nice big number would surely strike its adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, as the absolute nadir of “corny,” but maybe we could use a little corn, as the data centers invade our farmland.
Pour out a Scotch and soda — make that a malted milk — for this spry codger of a novel that’s stayed on the dance floor long past when might be expected, leaping over book bans from the right and dodging cancellation from the left. “Catcher” has somehow inspired artists as disparate as John Guare and Guns N’ Roses, its denunciation of phoniness presaging the social-media demand for “authenticity.”
Though set mostly in the sophisticated precincts of New York City where Salinger was raised but did not remain, “Catcher” might be the purest of the Great American Novels. (Partly because it has never been made into a movie, though everyone from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg tried to secure the rights.)
It’s also one of the dirtiest: ruffling parents and school boards with its fingernail clippings, shaving stubble, blood, flatulence, drunkenness, voyeurism, vulgarity, prostitution, profligacy and slang. Oh so much delectable lost slang.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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All I recall is Chapman was holding a copy the day/night he killed Lennon. It just seems like an odd thing to take on an assassination to me. Whether it inspired him who knows. Insanity is a bit hard to follow some times.
When the main character is an uninteresting (to me), boring, brainless, mentally weak, contemptible little slug ...
IMO, the novel is utter rubbish.
It’s not the only novel I have seen that way, just the most famous one.
Another book we had to read was Hemingway’s godawful “The Sun Also Rises...............
I purchased a copy from my high school bookstore back in the stone age. Never could figure out what all the book banning fuss was about, until it dawned on me that it was an abridged edition. The only barely scandalous thing in that version was his male teacher getting a little too close to him. I say “barely scandalous” because the way the book was cut up, the idea of the teacher trying to hit on him was pretty much non-existent.
I read Slaughterhouse Five just recently as a Science Fiction book, it’s not too bad. It wasn’t one of the books we had to read in HS, but I remember the ‘cool kids’ that listened to Bob Dylan and read Henry David Thoreau talking about it.........
👍
I loved Men of Iron. Howard Pyle.
To be fair to me when I read it I was in my teens!!!
Only 75? They made us read it in HS in the late 70’s. We thought the story was set in the 20’s or 30’s, not the late 40’s or 50’s because Holden’s controversial “rebelliousness” didn’t seem to be any big deal to us or what we knew of our parents’ adolescence. We thought that kids who acted that way prior to WWII would be considered mentally ill by adults.
No judgment ... people enjoy different things. I’m blanking on the names, but there are a couple of sci-fi or fanatasy novel series in which the main character is a really wretched person. They’re quite popular (or were), but they did absolutely nothing for me.
“de gustibus non disputandam”
Content aside, I also don't find Salinger to be a great stylist.
The only book I hated worse than that one was “Death of a Salesman.” To me that was the literary equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
It was Anti-Capitalist garbage.
Have you ever met anybody named ‘Biff’?............
“Catcher in the Rye” is the most horrid book ever used to kill a tree!...................
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