“The Catcher in the Rye” was turned down by The New Yorker. The magazine had published six of J. D. Salinger’s short stories, including two of the most popular, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in 1948, and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” in 1950. But when the editors were shown the novel they declined to run an excerpt. They told Salinger that the precocity of the four Caulfield children was not believable, and that the writing was showoffy—that it seemed designed to display the author’s cleverness rather than to present the story. “The Catcher in the Rye” had already been turned down by the publishing house that solicited it, Harcourt Brace, when an executive there named Eugene Reynal achieved immortality the bad way by complaining that he couldn’t figure out whether or not Holden Caulfield was supposed to be crazy. Salinger’s agent took the book to Little, Brown, where the editor, John Woodburn, was evidently prudent enough not to ask such questions. It was published in July, 1951, and has so far sold more than sixty million copies.

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The world is sad, Oscar Wilde said, because a puppet was once melancholy. He was referring to Hamlet, a character he thought had taught the world a new kind of unhappiness—the unhappiness of eternal disappointment in life as it is, Weltschmerz. Whether Shakespeare invented it or not, it has proved to be one of the most addictive of literary emotions. Readers consume volumes of it, and then ask to meet the author. It has also proved to be one of the most enduring of literary emotions, since life manages to come up short pretty reliably. Each generation feels disappointed in its own way, though, and seems to require its own literature of disaffection. For many Americans who grew up in the nineteen-fifties, “The Catcher in the Rye” is the purest extract of that mood. Holden Caulfield is their sorrow king. Americans who grew up in later decades still read Salinger’s novel, but they have their own versions of his story, with different flavors of Weltschmerz—”Catcher in the Rye” rewrites, a literary genre all its own.

In art, as in life, the rich get richer. People generally read “The Catcher in the Rye” when they are around fourteen years old, usually because the book was given or assigned to them by people—parents or teachers—who read it when they were fourteen years old, because somebody gave or assigned it to them. The book keeps acquiring readers, in other words, not because kids keep discovering it but because grownups who read it when they were kids keep getting kids to read it. This seems crucial to making sense of its popularity. “The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.

Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Holden talks like a teen-ager, and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teen-ager as well. But like all the wise boys and girls in Salinger’s fiction—like Esmé and Teddy and the many brilliant Glasses—Holden thinks like an adult. No teen-ager (and very few grownups, for that matter) sees through other human beings as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of verbal incision. He sums people up like a novelist:

He was always asking you to do him a big favor. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he’s a real hot-shot, and they’re always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they’re crazy about themselves, they think you’re crazy about them, too, and that you’re just dying to do them a favor. It’s sort of funny, in a way. She was blocking up the whole goddam traffic in the aisle. You could tell she liked to block up a lot of traffic. This waiter was waiting for her to move out of the way, but she didn’t even notice him. It was funny. You could tell the waiter didn’t like her much, you could tell even the Navy guy didn’t like her much, even though he was dating her. And I didn’t like her much. Nobody did. You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.

His name was George or something—I don’t even remember—and he went to Andover. Big, big deal. You should’ve seen him when old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of a phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody’s question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady’s foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me.

”You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.” The secret to Holden’s authority as a narrator is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. That’s why he’s so funny. But The New Yorker’s editors were right: Holden isn’t an ordinary teen-ager—he’s a prodigy. He seems (and this is why his character can be so addictive) to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life.

The moral of the book can seem to be that Holden will outgrow his attitude, and this is probably the lesson that most of the ninth-grade teachers who assign “The Catcher in the Rye” hope to impart to their students—that alienation is just a phase. But people don’t outgrow Holden’s attitude, or not completely, and they don’t want to outgrow it, either, because it’s a fairly useful attitude to have. One goal of education is to teach people to want the rewards life has to offer, but another goal is to teach them a modest degree of contempt for those rewards, too. In American life, where—especially if you are a sensitive and intelligent member of the middle class—the rewards are constantly being advertised as yours for the taking, the feeling of disappointment is a lot more common than the feeling of success, and if we didn’t learn how not to care our failures would destroy us. Giving “The Catcher in the Rye” to your children is like giving them a layer of psychic insulation.

That it might end up on the syllabus for ninth-grade English was probably close to the last thing Salinger had in mind when he wrote the book. He wasn’t trying to expose the spiritual poverty of a conformist culture; he was writing a story about a boy whose little brother has died. Holden, after all, isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing that makes Hamlet’s feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief. Holden is meant, it’s true, to be a kind of intuitive moral genius. (So, presumably, is Hamlet.) But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it.

What drew Salinger to this plot? Holden Caulfield first shows up in Salinger’s work in 1941, in a story entitled “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which features a character called Holden (he is not the narrator) and his girlfriend, Sally Hayes. (The story was bought by The New Yorker but not published until 1946.) And there are characters named Holden Caulfield in other stories that Salinger produced in the mid-forties. But most of “The Catcher in the Rye” was written after the war, and although it seems odd to call Salinger a war writer, both his biographers, Ian Hamilton and Paul Alexander, think that the war was what made Salinger Salinger, the experience that darkened his satire and put the sadness into his humor.

Salinger spent most of the war with the 4th Infantry Division, where he was in a counter-intelligence unit. He landed at Utah Beach in the fifth hour of the D Day invasion, and ended up in the middle of some of the bloodiest fighting of the liberation—in Hürtgen Forest and then in the Battle of the Bulge, in the winter of 1944. The 4th Division suffered terrible casualties in those engagements, and Salinger, by his own account, in letters he wrote at the time, was traumatized. He fought for eleven months during the advance on Berlin, and by the summer of 1945, after the German surrender, he seems to have had a nervous breakdown. He checked himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg. Shortly after he was released, and while he was still in Europe, he wrote the first story narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, the real beginning of “The Catcher in the Rye.” It was called “I’m Crazy.” (It was published in Collier’s in December, 1945.)