Publisher: Little, Brown Company; 1st LB Books Mass Market Paperback Ed edition (1 May 1991)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316769487
ISBN-13: 978-0316769488
Product Dimensions: 11 x 1.5 x 17.2 cm

Book Description
Publication Date: 1 May 1991
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, For Esme ? With Love Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully of children. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondh description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain pleasure. However, like most lovers clowns poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can hle it to keep.

Product Description
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born what my lousy childhood was like, how my parents were occupied all before they had me, all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent". Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his 16-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born what my lousy childhood was like, how my parents were occupied all before they had me, all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive), capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.