The Catcher in the Rye (1951) The Catcher in the Rye covers 48 hours in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who has just flunked out of his expensive boarding school in eastern Pennsylvania. This makes the fourth school from which he's been expelled from. Holden heads to New York City, his home, and puts himself up in the Edmont Hotel. Over the next two days, through a series of encounters, Holden experiences the cynicism and phoniness of adult life— his narrative voice capturing the essence of teenage angst and alienation. About the author Jerome David Salinger established his reputation on the basis of a single novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), whose principal character, Holden Caulfield, epitomized the growing pains of a generation of high school and college students. The public attention that followed the success of the book led Salinger to move from New York to the remote hills of Cornish, New Hampshire, where he lived until his death in 2010. Before that he had published only a few short stories; one of them, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which appeared in The New Yorker in 1949, introduced readers to Seymour Glass, a character who subsequently figured in Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Salinger's only other published books. Of his 35 published short stories, those which Salinger wishes to preserve are collected in Nine Stories (1953)
Other interesting information: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/02/100-best-novels-catcher-in-the-rye-jdsalinger-holden-caulfield http://mentalfloss.com/article/64836/13-things-you-might-not-know-about-catcher-rye http://time.com/3677041/catcher-in-the-rye-review/
Topics for Discussion 1. Discuss Holden's observations about the carousel's gold ring at the end of the novel. What is the significance of the ring? What do his observations reveal about his state of maturity? In what way has his character changed—or developed—by the end of the story? 2. Do Holden's encounters with adult hypocrisy ring true to you? Or are they more a reflection of his own deteriorating mental stability? Or both? 3. Holden seems to be reaching out for genuine intimacy in his encounters. Is he himself capable of intimacy? Are any of the other characters capable of providing it? In fact, what is intimacy—sexual and/or non-sexual? 4. What role does Phoebe play in the novel? 5. What is the significance of the title—especially the fact that Holden gets Robert Burns’ poem wrong?