On July 16, 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was published for the first time. Since then, the book has sold over 65 million copies and become one of the most cherished books in American letters for its sandpaper ache and brisk-stepping prose. Today, as we celebrate The Catcher in the Rye, we're reading some of the best writing on its author J.D. Salinger.

To access articles held in our subscription databases, first authenticate with your library card number through the NYPL website, then click on the permalink in the article title.

"The Salinger Affair" by Julian Barnes
London Review of Books October 27, 1988
Following the publication of Ian Hamilton's In Search of J.D. Salinger, Julian Barnes (yes, that Julian Barnes) considers what happens when a literary biographer is refused access to the author and his letters and the biographer, like some "ethically-aware thief," imposes even more boundaries on his research. Barnes suggests that Hamilton uses himself as a placeholder for Salinger without ever revealing much emotional valence. Is Hamilton a "gumshoe," as the biographer believes? No, Barnes, declares. Hamilton is just a man "badger-hunting with an umbrella."

"The Man in the Glass House" by Ron Rosenbaum
Esquire June 1997 (via EBSCOhost)
In 1953, Salinger moved from Manhattan to Cornish, NH. Writer Ron Rosenbaum dares to dream — or at least, make the unannounced pilgrimage to the author's home — and finds himself standing at the edge of a Granite State property, where he meditates Salinger's "Wall of Silence" to near religious effect. After all, as Don DeLillo writes in Mao II, "When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."

"(Fashionaby) Spurious" by Joan Didion
The National Review November 18, 1961 (via Literature Resource Center)
For unapologetic nerds, it can be fun to imagine what would happen should two revered writers meet. What would happen if Barry Hannah met Janet Malcolm? What would happen in Vladimir Nabokov met Sylvia Plath? Joan Didion didn't, as far as we know, meet Salinger. However this is what happened when she met his Franny and Zooey: Didion wrote, "However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger's tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls."

"Betraying Salinger" by Roger Lathbury
New York Magazine  April 12, 2010 (via Academic One File)
In 1997, a small press called Orchises was to publish Salinger's novella Hapworth 16, 1924. It would be the author's first publication since the 1960s. In this mea culpa, publisher Roger Lathbury explains how the book went from a pipe dream to a near-reality before Salinger retreated into silence once more. 

"Holden Caulfield's Goddamn War" by Kenneth Slawenski
Vanity Fair February 2011
Salinger the Recluse is in image familiar to readers and non-readers alike, but what fewer consider is the image of Salinger at war. Slawenski draws up D-Day, the time Salinger and Hemingway drank champagne in Hürtgen, and how the war changed the character Holden Caulfield from his original iteration in “Slight Rebellion off Madison." "Holden comes to realize he can enter adulthood without becoming false and sacrificing his values;" Slawenski concludes, "Salinger came to accept that knowledge of evil did not ensure damnation." 

"Salinger Would Make Holden Caulfield Puke" by Alan Scherstuhl
Village Voice September 4, 2013  
Following the release of Shane Salerno's documentary Salinger, skewering the film became something of a bookish sporting event. Scherstuhl resists the urge to use the word "phony," unlike some of his more relentless peers, instead describing the reenactments in all their mawkish failure.