J. D. Salinger

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Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour - an Introduction

Franny and Zooey

And Other Stories

For Esmé - with Love and Squalor

The Catcher in the Rye

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I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.

He wrote a perfect novel and it changed US culture forever

His work meant a lot to me when I was a young person and his writing still sings.

It was a very pure voice he had. There was no one like him

He was the poet of youthful alienation before youth really knew what that was

Tough-tender... It charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel [in] acidly humorous deadpan satire

In honour of the centennial of the birth of J.D. Salinger in 1919, Penguin reissues all four of his books in beautiful commemorative hardback editions - with artwork and text based on the very first Salinger editions published in the 1950s and 1960s. 
 
'If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.' 
 
The first of J. D. Salinger's four books to be published, The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most widely read and beloved of all contemporary American novels. 
 
'The handbook of the adolescent heart' The New Yorker

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 marvellously 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 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.

J. D. Salinger was born in 1919 and died in January 2010. He grew up in New York City and wrote short stories from an early age, but his breakthrough came in 1948 with the publication in the New Yorker of 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'. The Catcher in the Rye was his first and only novel, published in 1951. It remains one of the most translated, taught and reprinted texts, and has sold over 65 million copies worldwide. He went on to write three further, critically acclaimed, best-selling works of fiction: Franny and Zooey, For Esmé - With Love And Squalor and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour - An Introduction. Salinger continued to write throughout his life and left behind a large body of unpublished work.

It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school. Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters - shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning. 
 
The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature: an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

The Catcher in the Rye

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J. D. Salinger

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