The Catcher in the Rye

I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time. – Samuel BeckettHe wrote a perfect novel and it changed US culture forever * Independent *His work meant a lot to me when I was a young person and his writing still sings. – Dave EggersIt was a very pure voice he had. There was no one like him – Martin AmisHe was the poet of youthful alienation before youth really knew what that was * Sunday Times *Tough-tender… It charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel [in] acidly humorous deadpan satire * TIME *

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 Esme - 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 Salinger continued to write throughout his life and left behind a large body of unpublished work.