The catcher in the rye - J. D. Salinger

Holden Caulfield is a seventeen-year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school, in 1950s New York. Precocious, sensitive and confused, he blunders through a haze of teenage failures, disappointments and anti-climaxes and delivers to the reader a bitter-sweet, biting commentary on all the 'phony' aspects of society and the 'phonies' themselves. Through his direct first-person narrative emerges one of the most touching, funny and nuanced portrayals of the confusions and frustrations of youth that exists in the literature of the English language, and a sparky and colloquial style that influenced generations of writers afterwards.

Innovative and revolutionary for its time, The Catcher in the Rye is as much a testament to and reflection of that time and its frustrations as it is a timeless and universal reflection on life, disillusionment, and growing up.

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 some 65 million copies.
Salinger also wrote several novellas and short stories, including Franny and Zooey, For Esm - With Love and Squalor, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.