I’ve read that kids nowadays don’t respond to The Catcher in the Rye like the kids of my generation. We ate that book up. Holden Caulfield was us, a funny, nutty adolescent, and as funny, nutty adolescents ourselves, we didn’t recognize the adult angst informing the character. We just liked some kid blowing off the norms of society, because that was what we wanted to do. We sort of missed the fact that he was having a mental breakdown, even though it was no secret in the text. We just didn’t care. To be honest, I don’t think we really understood the book at all. We just all wanted to be teen rebels, and here was a literary model of exactly that. The book was published in 1951. The next thing you knew, there were the teen rebels of the 50s and the hippies of the 60s. Salinger didn’t bring these about, but he helped set the standard. And that seems to be far from what he was trying to do. Maybe that’s one reason why he disappeared from the literary scene.
J. D. Salinger lived for 45 years after the publication of his last work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” in The New Yorker. He had written very little before that, but all of it was decidedly popular. So what was he up to all that time, living in New Hampshire, apparently a born writer, not publishing a word? Salinger biographer Kenneth Slawenski suggests in Salon that the writer was keeping busy:
“If the fistful of Salinger letters that have emerged since 2010 impart any significant news, it is the constant confirmation by Salinger himself that he was indeed still writing during the decades of his seclusion and amassing a considerable body of work… Neighbors recall him, even at age 90, intently filling in a small notebook he apparently carried everywhere. These and numerous other references are tantalizing clues to what may potentially prove to be the greatest group of posthumous publications since Kafka – and the hope of Salinger enthusiasts worldwide.”
The problem remains, Salinger’s will apparently bars the new material from being published for a while. What’s an enthusiast supposed to do?
