On July 16th 1951 J.D. Salinger went from short stories to the mainstream with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. It changed American literature and youth culture forever.

In the years prior, Salinger had been developing the protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

On June 6, 1944, J.D. Salinger landed on Utah Beach during the D-Day invasion carrying the first six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye in his backpack.

As a sergeant in the 4th Infantry Division, Salinger carried Holden Caulfield with him through some of the heaviest combat of World War II including the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of a concentration camp. He was so obsessed with finishing the novel that during active combat bombardments, fellow soldiers reported seeing him crawl under tables to type out pages on a portable typewriter.

When he finally marched into liberated Paris, he drove straight to the Hotel Ritz to show his drafts to Ernest Hemingway, who loved them. The book that generations of high school students read as a story about teenage angst was quite literally forged on the front lines of World War II.

Source: https://www.historysbestsellers.com/on-this-day/july-16/the-catcher-in-the-rye

… in which he says about posthumous publication of his father’s writings: “We’re getting there. We’re very close.”

I'm a pretty shitty artist tbh, but I could help but wanna draw Holden watching the Migration movie. It was a funny thought that popped into my head while my little cousin watched it...

I have been reading Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger for a few weeks now. I can agree with some things that the character says but most of the time I am just either lost or bored. I’m just now starting chapter 14 of and it’s absolutely killing me. I’ve been trying to give it a chance and see it through but I’m getting ready to throw in the towel especially because I have another book ready for pickup at my local library. I’ve been trying to read more classics and I’ve always had an interest in Catcher in the Rye, but I guess I’m not really clicking with it. Please let me know if it’s even worth finishing because I’m ready to give up on it smh. Could really use some advice

So this is my first post and I'm a little scared but I'm reading The Catcher in the Rye and I'm in chapter 15 and I can't help but ship Holden with Esther Greenwood from the Bell Jar. I only skimmed The Bell Jar but I honestly think they'd have a cute relationship... Please tell me if I'm wrong or opinions ig

What do you think about J. D. Salinger? I remember when I was a 15 year old first reading the Catcher in The Rye getting hooked, like someone understands me, like I'm Holden like he's literally me and I was laughing at his sarcasm and how miserable he is.

Hundreds of years later and I still like that wretched book. Lately I'm thinking more about Salinger and what his words meant to me back then and my spirit is longing to read him again, like coming back home or something.

I know that many dislike The Catcher in The Rye and have their reasons for it, while many like The Catcher in The Rye such as myself.

Salinger did wrote a few other books before disappearing from the public in 1965 and wanting to be left alone.

So in other words, his themes about alienation, spiritual seeking etc still speak to me.

H-12 cm

Bronze cast

Am I missing anything? All JDS stories that involve or reference Glass family members.

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (Seymour) (1948)

"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (Walt) (1948)

"Down at the Dinghy" (Boo Boo) (1949)

"Franny" (Franny) (1955)

"Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (Buddy, Seymour) (1955)

"Zooey" (Zooey, Bessie, Franny, Buddy) (1957)

"Seymour: An Introduction" (Buddy, Seymour) (1959)

"Hapworth 16, 1924" (Seymour, Buddy) (1965)

... if we had Hapworth's rumored companion piece, it would add up to... nine stories. Thanks folks, I'm here all week...try the wax and olives!

I do hope we eventually get more Glass family stories when and if any posthumous material appears. Would need to find the original link to verify, but pretty sure that Matt Salinger has alluded to the Hapworth companion piece and said it's much longer than Hapworth itself. Presumably the story about Les and Bessie and Seymour and Buddy attending a consequential party in 1926 that Buddy is working on when the Hapworth letter arrives?

"

I was recently inspired to write my own version of A Perfect Day for Bananafish, one of my favorite short stories. If you'd like to join in the fun, submit your own during the month of June, and vote on your favorites in the month of July.

So I just read The Laughing Man and after I had finished it I was genuinely under the impression that Mary Hudson was a trans woman (or whatever that looked like in 1928), and I know the time period makes this unlikely, but I was so surprised that no one else has interpreted it this way. Especially if the story of The Laughing Man is supposed to be semi-autobiographical based on the Chief's own life, I thought that the mention of Marcel Dufarge's daughter as "something of a transvestite" was supposed to parallel Mary since it also says later that the boys had "stared at her femaleness, [they] now glared at it". Not only that but the narrator sees a graduation photo of Mary on the bus and the chief then "finally admitted that she was a girl". I know this is also to do with how the narrator thought the photo "clashed with the general men-only décor" but I just thought the language and wording used was interesting.

I know this is probably a stretch to many but this is genuinely how I read it the first time and I was surprised that no one else had.

Also if you are going to straight away disagree because you're transphobic please don't.

I have a collection of 70+ different translations of Catcher in the Rye, collected over more than 25 years (the image is from the Persian edition). I travel a lot of this has been a passion project, a good excuse to visit new and used bookshops in different countries. I've read three editions (English, Spanish, Italian), but I have all the titles translated.

I have a few questions for the sub-Reddit:

• Does anyone know if there's a definitive database of translations that have been printed? I read speculation of very unusual editions (Esperanto, Latin, Quebec French) that I have been unable to find. But I'm sure there are still a few I'm missing.

• Is anyone aware of any others with large collections of translations of the book?

• Are there any scholars who study this area?

If anyone would like to see the cover of a different translation let me know. Chances are I have it, and if I do, I'm happy to post a couple more here.

I’m thinking that he might be a sun sagittarius, moon aquarius, cancer rising

I've just finished The Catcher in the Rye. I want to read Salinger's short stories more. Which one would be a good choice after The Catcher in the Rye.

I'm reading The Catcher in the Rye for the third time. This time I wanted to create a playlist for Holden. John Lennon's Beautiful Boy or Simon & Garfunkel's The Only Boy Living in New York are the first ones that come to mind. What are your suggestions?

I've read the quote of him stating that when an author is asked of his influences he simply shouts out the authors he loves. He names a lot of them, and you can definitely see traces of many of those author's in him, and I particularly feel the influence of Henry James despite their obvious differences. But I often wonder about those more contemporary to his time. For example, I read somewhere that Salinger's favorite author was John Cheever, but for the life of me I can never find any type of source for it. I've also recently been reading John O'Hara and he strikes me as someone Salinger might have liked and drawn things from, particularly his heavy use of dialogue. And being that O'Hara had close to the highest number of stories ever published in the New Yorker, it's very likely that Salinger read a lot of him. But I also think of Nabokov and specifically Lolita. In fact, A Perfect Day for Bananafish and Lolita have always occupied a similar place in my mind. Not to say Lolita specifically influenced that story, as I'm pretty sure Bananafish was published first, but I still can't help but feel like there's something there.

He did mention Hemingway and Fitzgerald as two authors he loved that were still living at the time, but I'm sure those influences have been talked about and are very apparent. Curious if anyone has ever seen anything on this, as I think most authors seem to hold the admiration of their contemporaries a bit closer to the chest.

I read Franny and Zooey. But I understood very little, the motives of Zen Buddhism and spirituality are obvious, but I would like to hear from those who understand this story really deeply

I was flipping back through this book and realized how much I loved this short passage. It was fun imagining Holden, a character people have such wildly different interpretations of.

I also visited the Museum of Natural History and took a lot of the photos you see in the video, along with some collected ephemera. True to the passage, the exhibits are still frozen in time, mostly unaltered from when Holden would have visited back then.

i think about him every single day. all the time. i’m currently wrapping up raise high / seymour an introduction. the order i read the books in was franny and zooey, (intermittently a quick catcher in the rye reread which led me to want to complete the read through of salinger) nine stories, and then raise high. i often wonder how people who read chronologically feel towards seymour. since i had read franny and zooey first, he was already so human to me. he haunts the narrative heavily and i cried reading through his interactions with sybil given context to the regard his family holds him in and i cried even harder when he killed himself. going straight into uncle wiggly after expands perspective on the impact he and buddy had amongst their siblings. we get to read through the long term affects of eloise’s grief from her lost love with walt. again, having read franny and zooey first, i pulled from zooey’s confrontation with franny where he explained to her that they were who they were because of how seymour and buddy raised them to be. then as we learn some of the nine stories were written by buddy, i grew to really love him and as i grew to love him, i grew to deeply grieve for him. i’m finding raise high / seymour to be my favorite so far. i’m most attached to buddy and seymour’s relationship as i’m finding the most profound moments to me have been relating to seymour. it’s all so heavy, salinger is a genius. my journey through his work has been one of the most memorable experiences of my life.