The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
The story of adolescent Holden Caulfield who runs away from boarding-school
in Pennsylvania to New York, where he preserves his innocence despite various
attempts to lose it. The colloquial, lively, first-person narration, with
its attacks on the 'phoniness' of the adult world and its clinging to family
sentiment in the form of Holden's affection for his sister Phoebe, made
the novel accessible to and popular with a wide readership, particularly
with the young.
