J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye still sells worldwide

Person: J. D. Salinger
Lived: 1919–2010
Field: Novelist
From: American

The story

Holden Caulfield was with J. D. Salinger for a decade before he became famous. The character first appeared in "Slight Rebellion off Madison", which The New Yorker accepted in 1941 but did not publish until December 1946, and he turned up again in "I'm Crazy" in Collier's in 1945. Salinger later explained, half joking, that he had combined the names of two film stars, William Holden and Joan Caulfield. In England in the months before D-Day, he completed six chapters of a novel about him.

Little, Brown and Company published The Catcher in the Rye on 16 July 1951, a date fixed after the Book-of-the-Month Club chose it as its midsummer selection. Holden recalls a long weekend before Christmas after he has been expelled from Pencey Prep, a school Salinger may have modelled on his own Valley Forge Military Academy, as he drifts around New York City. The title comes from Holden's mishearing of Robert Burns's song "Comin' Thro' the Rye": he imagines himself catching children before they fall from a cliff. Salinger admitted in 1953 that the book was, in his words, sort of autobiographical.

The New York Times called it an unusually brilliant first novel. Within two months it had been reprinted eight times, and it spent 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Some readers were shocked by its language, and the book was challenged in schools, yet a 1979 study found it was also the second most frequently taught novel in American public high schools.

Salinger's portrait of adolescent alienation and lost innocence was especially influential among young readers. By the late 1950s, Ian Hamilton wrote, it had become the book every brooding adolescent had to buy, and it has often been compared with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Its appeal crossed borders: Hamilton, a British poet, described his own shock of recognition on reading it at 17.

The novel remains widely read. The Guardian's obituary reported that it had been translated into 30 languages and sold more than 65 million copies, and the Jewish Virtual Library says it still sells around 250,000 copies a year. Time included it in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923, and readers placed it 15th in the BBC's Big Read survey in 2003.

Why it matters

The Catcher in the Rye has helped generations of young readers feel understood, and remains one of the most widely read American novels.

About J. D. Salinger

Author of The Catcher in the Rye, whose voice of adolescent alienation spoke for generations of readers, before he withdrew from public life for more than half a century.

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J. D. Salinger

1919–2010 · Novelist

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