Price: $17.99 - $7.03
(as of Sep 15, 2025 14:33:03 UTC – Details)
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger’s New Yorker stories–particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme With Love and Squalor–will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full 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, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and 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 and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
ASIN : 0316769177
Publisher : Back Bay Books
Publication date : January 30, 2001
Edition : Reissue
Language : English
Print length : 288 pages
ISBN-10 : 0275965074
ISBN-13 : 978-0316769174
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Reading age : 15+ years, from customers
Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.95 x 8 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #327 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3 in Teen & Young Adult Classic Literature #3 in Classic American Literature #17 in Classic Literature & Fiction
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