“Book bans”. At what point has it ever been illegal to buy, possess, or read this book. I read it long ago and enjoyed it and I am right of the right wing
A lot more phony people out there these days.
Didn’t it also inspire the assassin of John Lennon?
I hated that book! They made us read it in high school!
My English teacher was fresh out of college and thought it was perfect for us to read.
Why on Earth did they think that teenagers wanted to read a book about a teenager trying to get laid?.....................
Holden was a pussy.
Oh, how I hated that book.
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.
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.
75 doesn’t seem that old to me, if you want to know the truth.
Why does my intuition tell me this book is an important part of Cultural Marxism?
Mark Chapman, John Lennon’s killer, was inspired by Catcher in the Rye. The clown who tried to assassinate George Wallace (name eludes me) left behind a diary that reads scarily like Catcher as well.
That said, there is some good writing tucked into it, but too much moral emptiness.
Pure, Grade A crap.
It will be in the Public Domain in 2046. By then we should be seeing various knock-offs, both in print and in whatever passes for cinema by then.
Over rated
L
The book is 75. Holden would be more like 91. It seems like he would have had plenty of time to straighten himself out.
Stated by the NYTs without a trace of self-awareness...