“I like it when someone is excited about something. It’s nice.”
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In the spring of 1939, a J.D. Salinger—Jerry—took Whit Burnett’s creative writing class at Columbia. That semester, she didn’t pay anything overall, but still signed up for the class again in the fall. This time – after a letter of apology biographer Thomas Beller describes As for “the Big Bang of Salinger’s career” – he fared little better, producing three stories, one of which, “The Young Folks”, liked Burnett enough for him to publish it in the next issue. StoryInfluential literary magazine edited by him. Then, in 1941, Salinger sold another story, “a little rebellion from madison,” To the new Yorker; It featured a Holden Morrissey Caulfield on behalf of Penny Prep over the Christmas holidays. But this story would not be published until 1946, after the war.
Salinger was drafted in 1942, and famously wrote his way through the trenches. Upon his return, Burnett promised to publish his first book, a short story collection, but this did not happen and their relationship also broke down. Instead, Salinger continued submitting his short stories. the new Yorker (They won’t take anything else until “A perfect day for bananafishwhich was published in 1948), and continued working on his Holden Caulfield novel.
The Catcher in the Rye Published by Little, Brown on July 16, 1951. Initial reviews were mixed, but the novel sold like hotcakes, and soon became – and remains – a touchstone of American literature, especially for young people.
“The reason for the novel’s triumph and its impressive longevity lies in the simple fact that it changed the way youth is portrayed in fiction,” Critic Tom Taylor wrote In 2022. “Suddenly, the notion of American adolescence was touched upon and made three-dimensional, even if that depth was largely painted in dark gray. The idea of the teenager as neither hero nor anti-hero, simply a humorous child, a social idealist was born from these pages.”
And how is it faring on its 75th anniversary? “Holden’s moral rigor is refreshing in a cultural moment marked by a volatile mix of suspicion and absurdity,” Lily Meyer writes In atlantic. Read today, the novel, she argues, “offers a guide away from the manosphere and its pretensions: a case against nihilism and a vision of a gentlemanly kind of manhood, even if achieving it means living on the edge of a cultural cliff.” Could have left a worse legacy than that.
