The Catcher In The Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

$850.00

Item Number: 149154

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.

Book club edition of Salinger’s masterpiece, published the same year as the first. Octavo, original black cloth with gilt titles to the spine. Fine in the a very good dust jacket with the Lottle Jacoi portrait of Salinger to the rear panel. With the prospectus by Clifton Fadiman laid in.

"The Catcher in the Rye is undoubtedly a 20th-century classic. It struck a popular note, particularly with young readers, who strongly identified with Holden Caulfield and his yearning for lost innocence… Salinger's novel was, and continues to be, a phenomenal success" (Parker, 300). "This novel is a key-work of the 1950s in that the theme of youthful rebellion is first adumbrated in it, though the hero, Holden Caulfield, is more a gentle voice of protest, unprevailing in the noise, than a militant world-changer… The Catcher in the Rye was a symptom of a need, after a ghastly war and during a ghastly pseudo-peace, for the young to raise a voice of protest against the failures of the adult world. The young used many voices— anger, contempt, self-pity— but the quietest, that of a decent perplexed American adolescent, proved the most telling" (Burgess, 99 Novels, 53-4).