CATCHER IN THE RYE J.D. SALINGER

THE WRITER

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York, in 1919. His mother, Marie (née Jillich), was an Irish Catholic. His father, Sol Salinger was a Lithuanian Jew. Salinger's mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed as Jewish.
Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, then in 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue and was enrolled at a private school in Manhattan. There he was the manager of the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper, and acted in some drama productions, showing ¨an innate talent for drama", though his father opposed the idea of J.D. becoming an actor When he was kicked out for bad grades, his parents enrolled him into Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1936. At Valley Forge, Salinger began writing stories and was the literary editor of the class yearbook. He started his freshman year at New York University in 1936 but soon dropped out. The same thing happened at Orsinus College. In 1939, Salinger attended a Columbia evening writing class by an editor of Story magazine. Burnett published several of stories Salinger wrote at the end of the course and went on to become his mentor.
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to the The New Yorker, all of which were rejected. In December 1941, however, it finally accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison", a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager (Holden Caulfield) with "pre-war jitters" but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour rendered the story unpublishable and did not appear in the magazine until 1946.
He saw active combat after being drafted, after the Americans joined World War 11 and was also assigned to a counter intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He later entered a newly liberated concentration camp and remained emotionally affected by the experience his whole life.
He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker with no success until in 1948 he submitted ¨A perfect Day for Bananafish¨ which was immediately accepted: he went on to publish exclusively in The New Yorker.
By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddism and in the early fifties an adherent of Ramakrishna's Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.
In 1953, Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.[80] Already tightening his grip on publicity, though, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.
As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire and married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student. They had two children, Margaret and Matthew. After their marriage, J.D. and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya Yoga.
Salinger also convinced Claire to drop out of college and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, a demand he would repeat in subsequent relationships with young women. Because of their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated by Salinger's ever-changing religious whims and their isolation from other people.
Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. On the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference to his interest in privacy: "It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. He continued to publish stories related to the fictional Glass family and became a virtual recluse.
According to their daughter Margaret´s memoir, Salinger had isolated Claire from friends and relatives and made her"a virtual prisoner." Claire finally separated from him in September 1966; their divorce was finalized the following year. In 1972, at the age of 53, Salinger had a year-long relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, already an experienced writer for Seventeen
Upon learning in 1986 that the British writer, Ian Hamilton, intended to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935–65), a biography including letters Salinger had written to other authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the book's publication. Paradoxically many of his private affairs then became public in the form of court transcripts.
In 1995, the Iranian director, Dariush Mehrjuir, released the film Pari, an unauthorized and loose adaptation of Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Though the film could be distributed legally in Iran since the country has no official copyright relations with the United States, Salinger had his lawyers block a planned screening of the film. Mehrjui called Salinger's action "bewildering," explaining that he saw his film as "a kind of cultural exchange."

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It deals with complex issues of identity, sexuality, belonging, connection, and the highs and lows of adolescence..
The majority of the novel takes place in December 1949. It begins with Holden Caulfield sharing encounters he has had with students and faculty of Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. After being expelled from the college for poor grades, and an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up in the middle of the night and takes a train to New York. Not wanting to return to his family and instead checks into the dilapidated Edmont Hotel. There, he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a young prostitute around his age named Sunny; after he tells her he just wants to talk, she becomes annoyed with him and leaves. However, he still pays her for her time. She demands more money than was originally agreed upon and when Holden refuses to pay he is beaten by her pimp, Maurice (despite her suggestion that he simply threaten the money out of Holden and leave).
Holden spends a total of three days in the city, characterized largely by drunkenness and loneliness. Eventually, he sneaks into his parents' apartment while they are away, to visit his younger sister, Phoebe, who is nearly the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate. Phoebe views Holden as a hero, and she is naively unaware that Holden's view of her is virtually identical. Holden shares a fantasy he has been thinking about (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns' poem Comin' Through the Rye): he pictures himself as the sole guardian of numerous children running and playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if they wander close to the brink; to be a "catcher in the rye".
point of view of its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, following his exact thought process (a writing style known as stream of consciousness). There is flow in the seemingly disjointed ideas and episodes; for example, as Holden sits in a chair in his dorm, minor events such as picking up a book or looking at a table, unfold into discussions about experiences. Critical reviews agree that the novel accurately reflected the teenage colloquial speech of the time.

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

To what extent does Holden change or develop throughout the book? Is it true, as some critics have maintained, that Holden is the same person after that he was before?
Is the book for teenagers or does it have an adult audience?
Why has the book been one of the most taught and most ´challenged´ in North American schools?