The Catcher in the Rye

Holden Caulfield is sixteen, recently expelled from his prep school in Pennsylvania, and unwilling to wait for the term to end. He leaves early and heads to New York City, the city where he grew up, carrying little more than a suitcase and a restless need to make sense of the adult world closing in around him. Over three days he moves through hotels, bars, streets, and brief encounters with strangers and old acquaintances, narrating each episode in a voice that shifts between sharp observation and raw confusion.

Salinger wrote Holden as someone caught between adolescence and adulthood, suspicious of what he calls phoniness yet unable to articulate what he wants instead. His sensitivity runs alongside a streak of negativism that colors nearly every interaction. He is funny, contradictory, and often unreliable in his own telling. The novel, first published in 1951, is set almost entirely within Manhattan and its surroundings during a few winter days. Its first-person narration stays close to spoken American English, giving the story a directness that was unusual for literary fiction at the time of its release.