Word: holden
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Illustrations for the story are by Russell Hoban, 36, who is such a Salinger fan that he and his wife named two of their daughters after Salinger characters, Esmé and Phoebe. In painting how Zooey, Franny, Mrs. Glass and Holden look to him, Hoban was fearful of violating "their private rights to exist in the reader's mind," and tried to be scrupulous to the author. "Salinger, I think, is a man without eyelids," says Hoban. "All of his material comes to him so painfully; it costs so much to write, more than anyone else who comes...
...Boston papers." He wrote one of Time's most-talked-about articles last year, coining the phrase and describing the practice of publishing "non-books." He was at Oberlin College when The Catcher in the Rye came out, "and liked it enormously, but did not identify with Holden Caulfield, because at the time I thought I was Eugene Gant." (Translation for the Holden Caulfield set: Skow was then hung on Tom Wolfe...
...Weeks before the official publication date, Salinger's followers queued up, and bookstores sold out their first supplies. To a large extent, the excitement is fueled by memories of Salinger's most famous work. For of all the characters set to paper by American authors since the war, only Holden Caulfield, the gallant scatologer of The Catcher in the Rye, has taken flesh permanently, as George F. Babbitt, Jay Gatsby, Lieut. Henry and Eugene Gant took flesh...
...Holden is not merely a sort of Penrod of the Angst age. He is more nearly a modern and urban Huckleberry Finn...
Both Huck and Holden are in the same lineage of what Critic Leslie Fiedler calls the Good Bad Boys of American literature. Like Huck, Holden longs to be out of civilization and back in innocent nature...