Word: caulfield
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Young-adult novels, as the genre used to be called, still center on disenfranchised adolescents who could be direct descendants of Holden Caulfield. Now, though, says Stephen Roxburgh, president and publisher of Front Street Books, "the heat has been turned up." Front Street helped bring so-called bleak books to early teens in 1997 when it published one book set in a juvenile-detention facility (Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree) and another in which a 13-year-old sleeps with her mother's boss (Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves). They were followed by Melvin Burgess...
...nearly five decades, Catcher in the Rye and the character of Holden Caulfield have been the example of adolescent alienation. Holden's alienation and despair are served up to young minds without much context or perspective. Young people today need a catcher in the rye to keep them from the steep cliffs of nihilism and moral relativism that are sold to them in popular media and in the classroom. Hats off to the youth workers who are catching kids right and left every day before they go over the cliff. PAUL SAILHAMER Fullerton, Calif...
Considering his wealth of symptoms--lethargy, forgetfulness, loss of interest in friends and studies--can there be any doubt that Holden Caulfield, the dropout hero of J.D. Salinger's 1950s masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye, would be on Luvox, Prozac or a similar drug if he were a teenager today? No doubt whatsoever. A textbook teen depressive by current standards, Caulfield would be a natural candidate for pharmaceutical intervention, joining a rising number of adolescents whose moodiness, anxiety and rebelliousness are being interpreted as warning signs of chemical imbalances. Indeed, if Caulfield had been a '90s teen, his incessant...
...least one hopes so. Teenage skepticism--Holden Caulfield's bitter gift for discerning inconsistencies in the solemn pronouncements of adults--may be one of the troubling traits on the medicators' target list. A pill that tones down youthful b.s. detectors would certainly be a boon to parents and teachers, but how would it enrich the lives of teenagers? Even if such a pill improved their moods--helping them stick to their studies, say, and compete in a world with close to zero tolerance for unproductive monkeying around--would it not rob them (and the rest of us) of a potent...
...drugs) that such diseases are real and formidable, impossible to wish away. But for kids in the murky emotional borderlands described in books like The Catcher in the Rye, antidepressants, stimulants and sedatives aren't a substitute for books and records, heroes and antiheroes. "I get bored sometimes," Holden Caulfield says, "when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am--I really do--but people never notice it. People never notice anything...