• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1496 0

mid-1950s witnessed the spontaneous emergence of a youth movement that felt alienated from the materialistic society of its parents. Rebelling against the rigid conformity that had infused American society since the war, many young people of the 1950s sought a collective voice through which they could express their disillusionment and frustration with the world around them. They looked for validation of their emerging discontent, which would grow steadily until it changed society beyond recognition. Many found this validation in The Catcher in the Rye. Years after Catcher’s initial publication, the youths of America suddenly seized upon the character of Holden Caulfield as the spokesperson for their generation. Feeling that Holden spoke directly to them and that Salinger, with his battle against phoniness and consumerism, expressed their own dissatisfactions with society, they began to rally around Salinger’s work with devotion. The result has often been referred to as “the Cult of Catcher,” an almost religious frenzy that began to surround the novel and the author who had created it. Among students it became fashionable to be seen carrying The Catcher in the Rye or Nine Stories. Young men mimicked Holden Caulfield in their attitudes and their dress. Ironically, in a subculture where nonconformity was the measure of worth, association with the character of Holden Caulfield became a requirement.

Looking upon their students in bewilderment, the reaction of academics was surprising. The years 1956 and 1957 witnessed the first serious intellectual analysis of Salinger’s work. The writer who himself had never graduated from college and had derided the academic community at every opportunity suddenly found himself the topic of furious academic discussion. At university campuses across America, Salinger became a scholarly preoccupation of both professors and students.

An example of Salinger’s new position occurred as early as the close of 1956, when he received an offer from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, asking him to take a position on the school faculty. Shortly after his thirty-eighth birthday, Salinger responded with a gentle scolding, declining the offer and explaining that he found it difficult to work around people and felt it best that he remain in Cornish. There were other reasons too, Salinger confessed, why he felt an academic position in Michigan was out of the question. These had to do “with personal convictions about how and where a practicing fiction writer should live,” which he characterized as being “firm” but “not interesting.”9

The University of Michigan offer naturally recalled Salinger’s discomfort at Sarah Lawrence College in 1949 and the conflict that subsequently raged between his convictions and ego. That Salinger’s ego was immense is indisputable. Yet, in deference to his religious beliefs, he struggled to contain it all of his life, perhaps explaining why the relative seclusion of Cornish—away from the constant buzzing of admirers—was so attractive to him and vital to his work.

As Salinger continued to write and to publish, his influence grew. By 1959, the call to rebellion that the public had come to associate with Salinger’s work began to bleed into mainstream society. The theater became infused with the ideas of playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Arthur Miller, who depicted the alienation of individuals in conventional society in ways remarkably concurrent with the complaints of Holden Caulfield. American bookshelves began to collect the works of writers such as John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut, authors who had been profoundly influenced by Salinger at a young age. The controversial novel Lolita, which Vladimir Nabokov admitted had been inspired by “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” wedged its way into American awareness despite having been banned in 1955. During these years, Sylvia Plath, admittedly dazzled by Salinger’s intensity, completed her first draft of The Bell Jar, a novel clearly fashioned after The Catcher in the Rye. Not even Hollywood was immune to Salinger