Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski questioned whether “the novel itself is as relevant to the present generation as in times past.” Indeed, on Catcher’s 50th birthday, in 2001, Louis Menand of The New Yorker had opined: “The book keeps acquiring readers not because kids keep discovering it but because grownups who read it when they were kids keep getting kids to read it.” “Holden’s voice was mesmerizing and remained remarkably fresh some 20 years after … though, as I grew older, it was the short stories that really impressed me.” … What was extraordinary is how, in 1972, a 15-year-old schoolboy in an English town found himself entirely at home within this foreign idiom.”Ĭatcher “had an electric impact on me,” Jay McInerney related. I first heard from Ennio Ranaboldo, author of Invito alla lettura di Salinger ( Invitation to the Reading of Salinger), who told me of the Scuola Holden, a college founded in Turin, Italy, with its aim “to create a school Holden Caulfield would never be expelled from.” And British author Geoff Dyer responded: “ Catcher was a defining reading experience for me. Once a staple of the college and then of the high school syllabus, was Catcher in danger of being elbowed aside? I looked to others in the field for some answers. “Everybody loves Holden,” she assured me.īut at a recent visit to my family doctor, I learned that her son in middle school had selected the novel from a list of suggested titles. I had already queried my niece in high school a number of years ago, when the novel was included on her mandatory reading list.
I wondered whether Holden’s voice might still speak as clearly to us veteran fans and, if at all, to those younger.
On my 16th birthday, my mother gave me a copy and my lifelong obsession was born, growing to embrace other Salinger works and to inform my own publications on the author and his writings. Realizing that Catcher would celebrate a milestone birthday this year, I began to reminisce (having just turned 70 myself) about my attachment to the book. But Holden’s voice, as he tells his story of flunking out of prep school and embarking on a three-day odyssey through Manhattan, would gain international recognition. The author, however, was to forbid further monetization of the work, adamant to preserve his readers’ intimate relationship with its main character. The film rights alone could have purchased him all of Cornish, where he lived from 1953 until his death in 2010. He made it possible for me to have my freedom to do what I love.” As he confided to his close friend, Lillian Ross of The New Yorker: “That little boy, I owe so much to him. Tens of millions of copies have sold.Ĭatcher made Salinger moderately rich. The subject of 26 book-length studies and hundreds of articles, with thousands of magazine, newspaper, film, television, song - even cartoon - references, Catcher, narrated by eternal teenager Holden Caulfield, is available in four formats, including a Kindle edition. Clad in a red, white and yellow dust jacket with a carousel horse leaping across a cityscape, this short novel, now 70 years old, refuses to fade away. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye hit bookstore shelves. The photos taken for the book jacket of Salinger's 1951 novel, "Catcher in the Rye," were among nearly 50,000 images bequeathed to the university by German photographer Lotte Jacobi. Salinger is displayed at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H., on Tuesday, Jan.
#THE CATCHER IN THE RYE BY J. D. SALINGER TV#
Salerno is presenting his case in “Salinger,” a unique, 3-way project: A 700-page book, co-authored with David Shields a theatrical release distributed by the Weinstein Company and a TV documentary that will air on PBS in January 2014 as the 200th installment of “American Masters.” (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta, File) ap - Amy SancettaĪ previously unseen photo of author J.D. Screenwriter Shane Salerno has taken on a surprising and news-making identity: the latest, and, apparently, greatest seeker of clues about J.D. Salinger's classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye" at the Orange Public Library in Orange Village, Ohio. 28, 2010, file photo, shows copies of J.D. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta, File) Amy SancettaįILE - This Jan. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, died Wednesday at the age of 91. Salinger's classic novel "The Catcher in the Rye" as well as his volume of short stories called "Nine Stories" at the Orange Public Library in Orange Village, Ohio.