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JD Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger ’ s Life. Born Jerome David Salinger in 1919 Attended Valley Forge Military Academy, probably the model for Pencey Prep, and dropped out after two years.
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Salinger’s Life • Born Jerome David Salinger in 1919 • Attended Valley Forge Military Academy, probably the model for Pencey Prep, and dropped out after two years. • Drafted into the army in 1942 and was involved in the invasion of Normandy where his unit suffered heavy losses. • Several chapters of The Catcher in the Rye were in Salinger’s rucksack on Utah Beach, on D-Day. • He met Ernest Hemingway during the war, in Paris. • He wrote primarily short stories throughout the war, including “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” • Wrote The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, and was unable to deal with the fame and publicity. • Went into seclusion in New Hampshire and basically disappeared for forty years. • He passed away on January 27, 2010. • Rumors of hundreds of unpublished stories have so far not been proven true.
The Catcher in the Rye • In the tradition of picaresque narratives like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • Has been called a modern bildungsroman -- a novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character (Dictionary.com). • Fits into a an era of post-war literature in which authors began to question the white picket fence world of the fifties. • Like Huck Finn, the book was heavily criticized for being vulgar and remains one of the most widely challenged and banned books of all time.
The Catcher in the Rye • Salinger is sometimes half-jokingly credited with “inventing the teenager.” • Catcher was, however, the starting point for a new way to think about the weird transition period between childhood and adulthood. • Children, in fact, play a prominent symbolic role in most of Salinger’s work. • Salinger’s war experience war experience probably figures heavily into the character of Holden Caulfield. • Is the human experience of time – of growing up, leaving childhood, making compromises, maybe “selling out” – similar to, or different from, the loss of innocence experienced in war?
''Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean, except me. And, I'm 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're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.''
The Catcher in the Rye • Catcher ushered in a whole new way the American culture thought about the teen years. • Question: to what extent is the modern idea of ”the teenager” a product of the Second World War? • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXRgAXU1-T4