The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger
Summary
Holden Caulfield narrates the days after he is expelled from Pencey Preparatory Academy for failing four of five classes, leaving campus early rather than face his parents right away. He drifts through New York City for a long weekend: hiring a prostitute named Sunny he cannot bring himself to sleep with, taking his old girlfriend Sally Hayes to a matinee and ice skating instead of calling Jane Gallagher, the girl he really cares about, and visiting his former English teacher Mr. Antolini, whom Holden flees in the middle of the night after misreading a gesture as a pass at him. He sneaks home to see his younger sister Phoebe, the one person he speaks to without contempt, and tells her his daydream of standing in a field of rye catching children before they fall off a cliff at its edge, not quite understanding, as Phoebe gently points out, that the actual song goes if a body meet a body coming through the rye, about romance rather than rescue. Holden plans to run away west, but Phoebe's insistence on coming with him breaks his resolve, and the book ends with him watching her ride a carousel in the rain, so happy he could have cried, before an epilogue reveals he is narrating from a California rest home, recovering from an illness the novel never quite names, uncertain whether he will return to school in the fall.
Salinger confines the whole book to Holden's voice, chatty, slangy, endlessly circling back to phony as its harshest word, and that voice is what makes the novel read fast even though almost nothing happens in it by the standard of plot. Readers argue for good reason about how much to trust him: his contempt for nearly everyone around him reads as insight to some and as a symptom to others, and the ambiguous ending refuses to say which reading is correct.
Salinger drew on his own prep school years and his combat service in the Second World War, though the novel keeps the war offstage entirely, and he published only a handful of stories in the decades after, retreating to Cornish, New Hampshire and refusing nearly every request to adapt, discuss or continue the book for the rest of his life.
Historical Context & Significance
Little, Brown published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951. Nash K. Burger called it an unusually brilliant novel in the New York Times, and James Stern wrote an admiring review in Holden's own voice for the same paper, but the book took no prize that year; the 1952 Pulitzer for the novel went to Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny and the National Book Award to William Faulkner's Collected Stories, both safer choices next to a book Salinger's own eventual detractors worried might unsettle readers.
Between 1961 and 1982 it was the most censored book in American high schools and libraries, challenged over vulgar language and sexual content, and simultaneously one of the most assigned; a Tulsa teacher fired in 1960 for teaching it was later reinstated. None of that suppression slowed it down: the book sells roughly a million copies a year, more than 65 million worldwide, and Salinger refused every film offer, including approaches tied to Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, so despite six decades of interest it has never once been adapted for the screen.