And witness the notable vehemence with which Holden talks about the war-declaring, for instance, 'I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. Holden may be a rebel without a cause, but he is not a rebel without an explanation: It is easy to read the death of his brother as a stand-in for unspeakable trauma.

Where Salinger fought in some of the bloodiest and most senseless campaigns of WorldВ War II and apparently suffered a nervous breakdown toward its end, shortly after which-while still in Europe-he is known to have been working on Catcher-it is hardly surprising that Holden's reactions should evoke not only adolescent turmoil but also the awful seesaw of a vet's return to civilian life. His daughter, Margaret Salinger, likewise traces the alienation in the book to him, though it does not reflect for her either her father's innate temperament or difficult adolescence so much as his experiences of anti-Semitism and, as an adult, war. Numerous youthful acquaintances remember him as sardonic, rant-prone, a loner. More importantly, Salinger seems to have shared Holden's disaffection. And he was also, like Holden, manager of his high school fencing team, in which capacity he apparently really did once lose the team gear en route to a meet. He did, though, like Holden, flunk out of prep school. Where did all this start? In a 1940 letter to a friend, a 21-year-old Salinger described his novel-in-progress as 'autobiographical' and decades later, too, in an interview with a high school reporter-the only interview he's ever given-Salinger said, 'My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book.' Of course, there were differences: unlike Holden, Salinger was, among other things, a half-Jewish, half-Catholic brotherless World War II vet who attended a military academy.

What critic George Steiner was to call the 'Salinger industry' began to swell fantastically, until it sat like a large, determined bird on a bunker-like egg. So many Catcher studies appeared that the '50s were dubbed 'the Decade of Salinger' contemporaneous writers complained of neglect as Holden Caulfield was compared not only to Huck Finn but to Billy Budd, David Copperfield, Natty Bumpo, Quentin Compson, Ishmael, Peter Pan, Hamlet, Jesus Christ, Adam, and Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom put together. Moreover, in 1956, some dam in critical interest seemed to burst. Did not Catcher seem like the sort of book that might do well in the new format?ДЄnd so it did, going on to sell over 60 million copies. What with the recent invention of the 'perfect binding'-a book binding using glue rather than stitching-there was the paperback to consider, as well. Sales-wise, too, Catcher did reasonably but not exceptionally well. Still, Harcourt Brace, which rejected the book, did not yet have much to live down: The overall critical reception was decidedly un-extraordinary. even laugh aloud,' and many immediately compared Holden to Huck Finn. Other critics did say it made them 'chuckle and.

Catholic World noted its 'formidably excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language,' and there seemed to be some question as to whether an alienated, hard-drinking, chain-smoking flunkie like Holden Caulfield was going to prove a good influence on the young. Salinger is, of course, to remember The Catcher in the Rye-though not, perhaps, how some critics didn't like it in 1951.

What is the catcher in the rye