Last week, I watched Prime Documentary Salinger.
The Catcher in the Rye is J. D. Salinger’s masterpiece, partially published in serial form in 1945–46 before being novelized in 1951. Initially intended for adults, adolescents often read it for its themes of angst and alienation and as a critique of superficiality in society. Salinger is a decade older than my parents, and his heroic protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is a decade older than me. His teenage character burst on the Americana Scene a few years before I was born.
When I read the book as a teenager, I felt touched by Salinger — his writing opened inner doors I hadn’t accessed. The setting was the early 1950s, the era of my birth in SurfaceWorld. At the time I read The Catcher in the Rye in the mid-1960s, there were beginning echos of self-awareness through love, peace, rock, and roll, but in his day, scrawling Holden Caulfield stories in the rain and the mud of World War II, when there was no word for PTSD except shellshock barely muttered by old men, he wrote from a dungeon of repressed narratives and feelings. By now, his character, Holden Caulfield, has been diagnosed as…
