John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

The Catcher in the Rye[edit]

Main article: The Catcher in the Rye

Dust jacket of The Catcher in the Rye, first edition

In the 1940s, Salinger confided to several people that he was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of his short story "Slight Rebellion off Madison",^[52] and Little, Brown and Company published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951.^[53] The novel's plot is simple,^[54] detailing 16-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City after his fourth expulsion and departure from an elite college preparatory school.^[55] The book is more notable for the persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden.^[56] He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity.^[56] In a 1953 interview with a high school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining, "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... [I]t was a great relief telling people about it."^[57]

Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging from The New York Times hailing Catcher as "an unusually brilliant first novel"^[58] to denigrations of the book's monotonous language and Holden's "immorality and perversion"^[59] (he uses religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution).^[60] The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, it had been reprinted eight times. It spent 30 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.^[54] The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late 1950s, according to his biographer Ian Hamilton, it had "become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed."^[61] It has been compared to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.^[62] Newspapers began publishing articles about the "Catcher Cult",^[61] and the novel was banned in several countries—as well as some U.S. schools—because of its subject matter and what Catholic World reviewer Riley Hughes called an "excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language".^[63] According to one angry parent's tabulation, 237 instances of "goddamn", 58 uses of "bastard", 31 "Chrissakes", and one incident of flatulence constituted what was wrong with Salinger's book.^[63]

In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye "had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools" (after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men).^[64] The book remains widely read; as of 2004, it was selling about 250,000 copies per year, "with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies".^[65]

Mark David Chapman, who shot singer-songwriter John Lennon in December 1980, was obsessed with the book. His main motive was his frustration with Lennon's lifestyle and public statements, as well as delusions he suffered related to Holden Caulfield.^[66][67]

In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received (and rejected) numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn.^[49] Since its publication, there has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder,^[68] Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg^[69] among those seeking to secure the rights. In the 1970s Salinger said, "Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden."^[70] Salinger repeatedly refused, and in 1999 his ex-lover Joyce Maynard concluded, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."^[70]