When I think of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, one of the first things that comes to mind is how often people have tried to ban it. I suppose that’s because when I first read the novel in high school, it was the number one banned book in schools and libraries in the United States. It held that distinction for more than twenty years, from 1960, when a teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma was fired for assigning the book in her 11th grade class, through 1982. This included a 1978 case in which three members of a school board in Washington wanted the book banned because they were convinced with was a part of a communist plot. By 1981, it was not only the most banned book, but the second most commonly assigned book in American high schools. During the decade of the 1990s, the novel fell to 10th most frequently challenged book, and in the first decade of the 21st century, it was number 19 on the list. By the 2010s, Catcher in the Rye was down to number 49 on the “most challenged” top 100. This falling off from controversy is probably the product of two tendencies: First, today’s teachers may consider the novel, now more than 70 years old, a bit old fashioned for contemporary teenagers. Second, other books have grown more notorious in the public imagination, whether it’s Harry Potter and his demonic wizardry, The Hunger Games with adolescents killing each other, or books that deal more explicitly with sexuality, or with the even more sensitive issue of same-sex relationships, even if they are between penguins. All this probably makes the language, rebellion, sexual references and occasional blasphemy of Holden Caulfield seem pretty tame by comparison.
Salinger’s first and most admired novel is also one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into 30 languages and having sold an estimated 65 million copies worldwide at the time of Salinger’s death 14 years ago. It appears on many “Greatest Books” lists, including Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest English language novels since 1923, the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest English language novels, and the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest world novels. It was ranked as number 64 on the famous 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century, and number 60 on the rival “Twentieth Century’s Greatest Hits” list that came out in competition with the Modern Library. On the PBS “Great American Read” list, the novel ranked as number 30 among American voters. It was number 24 on Penguin publishers’ “100 Must Read Classics” as voted on by their readers. And in the 2003 BBC “Big Read,” Catcher in the Rye ranked as number 15 among British readers voting for their favorite English language books—suggesting the novel is even more loved in the U.K. than in the U.S. Perhaps even more impressive, on the “Greatest Books in the World” website, which compiles an aggregate of 375 different “Great Books” lists, The Catcher in the Rye is the fourth most honored book among English language novels (trailing only The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, and 1984).
These are rarified heights for a modest little book like Salinger’s. Parts of the novel were published in magazines right after the Second World War, but The Catcher in the Rye was not published in book form until 1951. Salinger intended the novel for an adult audience, but since teenagers could relate easily with Salinger’s sixteen-year-old protagonist Holden Caulfield and his alienation from a society he finds superficial and “phony,” his depression and angst over the loss of innocence, his search for identity, and his feelings of rebellion, it was inevitable that the novel would become a staple in high school classes across the country.
As the book opens, we hear Holden speaking in his own voice, just as an adolescent in 1951 would speak, full of contemporary teenage slang and topical references from post-war America. The closest analogue to Holden’s voice is that of Huck Finn himself, which comes to us straight out of the mouth of an untutored country boy from 1840s Missouri. Like Huck’s, Holden’s is a voice with a kind of a chip on its shoulder, a youthful voice tinged with the cynicism of innocence betrayed:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
We may wonder at first just who Holden is talking to here. Is this simply intended for the reader? Has Salinger placed us among a group to whom Holden is telling his story? Is he inviting the reader in to be an audience for Holden’s personal confessions? It isn’t until much further along that we realize Holden is speaking to a counselor or therapist about what happened over a very significant three-day period just before last Christmas, about the events that landed him in this facility—the events that caused his breakdown.
Holden begins by describing his boarding school, Pencey Preparatory Academy in Pennsylvania. We see him first going to say farewell to his history professor, Mr. Spencer, where we learn he has been expelled from the school for failing all his classes except English. Back in his dorm, his roommate Stradlater asks Holden to write an essay for him because he has a hot date with Jane Gallagher, a girl Holden himself has long admired. When Stradlater returns, he is disappointed in Holden’s essay, which was a very personal composition about Holden’s younger brother Allie’s baseball mitt, and here we learn that Allie died of leukemia a few years earlier. When Stradlater refuses to tell Holden whether or not he had sex with Jane, he picks a fight with Stradlater. Holden storms out, resolving to leave school a few days early and take the train home to New York that evening, planning to rent a room at the Edmont Hotel for a few days. He doesn’t want to face his parents yet, since they won’t be officially informed of his expulsion yet.
Lonely and depressed, Holden spends some time dancing with some women in the Edmont’s nightclub. When he goes back to his room, the elevator man offers to send a prostitute to him. The prostitute, Sunny, seems the same age as Holden, and he decides he just wants to talk to her. This only annoys her, and she leaves the room, only to return with her pimp Maurice, demanding more money. She takes it from Holden’s wallet and Maurice punches him in the stomach and leaves. Next morning, still searching for genuine human companionship, Holden calls an ex-girlfriend Sally Hayes (though he has already referred to her as “queen of all phonies”). She agrees to go with him to a show at the Biltmore theater, after which they go skating at Rockefeller Center. Here Holden regales her with his complaints about the “phonies” in his world, and tries to get her to agree to run away with him to live in the wilderness of New England. But Sally wants no part of this, and leaves angrily. After meeting Carl, a former schoolmate, at a bar, Holden annoys Carl by asking him incessant questions about his sex life, and Carl also leaves early, telling Holden he ought to see a psychiatrist.
Finally, yearning for the true human contact with his 10-year-old sister Phoebe, Holden sneaks in to his parents’ house while they are away and Phoebe is asleep. Phoebe is delighted to see him, but upset at his expulsion, and demands to know whether he cares about anything. At this point Holden tells Phoebe that what he would really like to be is a “catcher in the rye.” Misremembering Robert Burns poem “Comin’ through the Rye” as containing the line “if a body catch a body comin’ through the rye,” Holden says that he imagines himself saving children who are running through a field of rye by catching them before they run off a cliff. This is most often interpreted as saving them from growing up, from “falling” into the inevitable “phoniness” of adulthood. When Phoebe corrects him and tells him the line is if a body meet a body comin’ though the rye,” Holden breaks down and cries.
Next day, Holden talks Phoebe into cutting school and takes her to the zoo, where he has one moment of actual joy and contentment when he watches her riding on the carousel. For some readers, this suggests he is serving his function as a catcher in the rye, bringing her to where she can remain in childish innocence. The things that Holden loves about Phoebe are the aspects he admires in children in general: innocence, generosity, kindness—all things he cannot find in adults or even in his peers at this stage. But Holden does come to see that the children on the carousel all want to grab for the ring—they aspire to something more, they aspire to maturity, to that fall into adulthood. And he seems to accept this. “If they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything,” he concludes as he watches the children. “If they fall off, they fall off.” I won’t tell precisely how the book ends, though as you might suspect Holden falls even deeper into despair by the conclusion, so that he can say, apparently to the therapist he’s been talking to, that he “got sick” after meeting with his parents.
For some readers, the theme of loss of innocence in a coming of age novel is all they see in The Catcher in the Rye. Some have even faulted Holden for his immaturity and for what may look like an over-sentimentalizing of childhood innocence. But there are at least two other points to consider. I think that the death of Holden’s younger brother Allie is much more important to Holden’s state of mind than most readers or critics make of it. Seeing his closest sibling at so tender an age waste away with a terminal illness is certainly what has triggered Holden’s view of the importance of retaining childhood innocence. Stopping children from falling off a cliff applies more to Allie than to anyone else in the novel. Holden is dealing with what can only be called post-traumatic stress, and dealing with it without professional help—at least in the period described in the novel.
Secondly, Salinger admitted to the novel’s being “semi-autobiographical.” Salinger, a veteran of Utah beach on D-Day and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, himself suffered from “battle fatigue” as it was called at the time, and understood better than most of his readers what his character was going through. To suggest that Holden’s trauma is merely self-centered immaturity is a trivialization that does not give the novel its proper due.At least a couple of generations of readers, however, have seen Holden Caulfield as a protagonist they could relate to strongly. President George H.W. Bush said that the novel inspired him, and readers as diverse as Bill Gates, Andrew Yang and Aaron Sorkin have counted it among their favorite books. It’s certainly one of mine. And of millions of others. Sadly, though, the media attention that came with the novel’s popularity, and its notoriety, was uncomfortable for the introverted Salinger, who became something of a recluse. He was also adamantly opposed to anyone turning Catcher in the Rye into a film, play, or other entertainment (he’d had a bad experience with the filming of one of his short stories in the 40s, and was soured on the process. Despite the interest of Billy Wilder, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Disney and others over the years, he never reneged on that position. Thus everyone’s Holden is their own personal Holden, uninfluenced by stage, screen or television. Maybe it’s yourself.