Word: catcher
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...withdrawal may mean merely that his social needs are met by a wife and two children (Matthew, 1�, and Peggy, a precociously bright five-year-old). But Salinger is at work on his first really large body of fiction. The Glass family story cycle is already far longer than Catcher, and clearly it is nowhere near completion (a friend reports that Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy). Since his marriage, the author has exhausted himself, and his supply of sociability, in a protracted effort to give his legend structure and direction, to deal with characters who speak...
...Good Bad Boys. A generation or two of high school and college students, particularly those who have at least a sneering acquaintance with the Ivy League, still see in Catcher their hymn, their epic, their Treasury of Humor, and their manifesto against the world. A decade after first publication, the book still sells 250,000 copies a year in the U.S. Sociologist David Riesman assigns Catcher in his Harvard course on Character and Social Structure in the U.S., perhaps because every campus has its lonely crowd of imitation Holdens?doomed wearers of raincoats-in-December, who rehearse faithfully their Caulfield...
Like Huck, speaking the superbly authentic dialect of his age and his place, Holden is a runaway from respectability, the possessor of a fierce sense of justice, the arbiter of his own morality. If one fact more than any other links Catcher to its generation, it is that for Holden?as presumably for his creator?the ultimate condemnation is summed up in the word phony. A whole, vague system of ethics centers around that word, and Holden Caulfield is its Kant...
...everywhere, in a world of insufficient love. He is a self-conscious and sometimes absurd adolescent, but he is also a doomed human being of special sensitivity?not merely special, as Salinger might say, but Special. As such, he sets the theme for almost everything Salinger has written since Catcher. Most men know how to ignore, suppress or outwit the occasional suspicion that the world is really not to be borne?but the young, the mad. and the saints do not know the trick. To varying degrees, most Salinger characters, includinging those in Franny and Zooey, belong in these three...
...year-old Windsor, Vt., high school girl who wrote an article for her school paper in 1953). He will turn and run if addressed on the street by a stranger, and his picture has not appeared on a dust jacket since the first two printings of Catcher (it was yanked off the third edition at his request). He has refused offers from at least three book clubs for Franny and Zooey, and has not sold anything to the movies since Hollywood made a Susan Hayward Kleenex dampener of his Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut...