Jerome David Salinger The Catcher In The Rye

As a novelist, J.D. Salinger belongs to a distinct group of American writers who began their literary careers during or immediately after the Second World War, the so-called “young novelists” – James Baldwin, William Styron, etc.
The Ctcher in the Rye confirmed and sustained his reputation and gained him a position as one of the most important American writers of the young generation. The book is nevertheless a first-rate novel and one of the most convincing studies of adolescence ever to be written by an American. Salinger is widely seen as a keen students of children. In 1951 he published The Catcher in the Rye – a touching psychological study of adolescence, in which he views the American way of life through the eyes of a teen-age nonconformist, Holden Caulfield, a twentieth century rival of Twain’s Huck Finn. Holden is a person whose defining quality is his inability to behave according to the strict morals and social code of the day. Salinger’s sensitive and defiant school boy defies conventions and remains innocent about them. Holden images himself protecting a group of children happily playing in a rye field, from falling into a nearby precipice: “keep picturing these little kids, playing some game in this big field of rye....Thousands of little kids, and nobody around – nobody big, I mean except me. And I am standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do? I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff. I mean – if they are running and they don’t look where they are going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”.............