Summary
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" ( The New Yorker ) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.
"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."
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
J. D. Salinger was born in New York City on January 1, 1919. He attended Manhattan public schools, Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, and three colleges, but received no degrees. He was from an upper class Jewish family and they lived on the upper west side of Manhattan on Park Avenue. Salinger joined the U. S. Army in 1942 and fought in the D-Day invasion at Normandy as well as the Battle of the Bulge, but suffered a nervous breakdown due to all he had seen and experienced in the war and checked himself into an Army hospital in Germany in 1945.
In December 1945, his short story I'm Crazy was published in Collier's. In 1947, his short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish was published in The New Yorker. Throughout his lifetime, he wrote more than 30 short stories and a handful of novellas, which were published in magazines and later collected in works such as Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, was his only novel. His last published story, Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in 1965. He spent the remainder of his years in seclusion and silence in a home in Cornish, New Hampshire. He died of natural causes on January 27, 2010 at the age of 91.
Salinger always wanted to write the great American novel; when he succeeded in this with Catcher in the Rye, he was unprepared for the onslaught on privacy issues that this popularity brought on. He never wanted to be in the spotlight and retreated from all contacts he had in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
