J. D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History by Josef Benson

Author:Josef Benson
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Autobiography, Literary Criticism, Historical, Biography, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781442277946
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

As the novel grew in popularity over the decade, so did its author. By the end of the decade Salinger was regarded as one of the very best authors in the United States.

As college students were identifying with Holden Caulfield and his indictment of phony white culture, a powerful faction in America viewed the book as dangerous and worthy of destruction. For example, in April of 1961, a student at the University of Texas formally complained about Catcher being part of the required reading list for her second-year English course. When the university supported the professor who assigned the book on the syllabus, the student’s father, a Houston attorney and port commissioner, threatened to withdraw his daughter from the school.

The history of The Catcher in the Rye in the 1960s is a parallel history. On one hand, the book was the most popular book in the United States among college students and perhaps the most demonized among parents, especially of high schoolers, demarcating the generational gap between the youth of the sixties and the baby boomers coming of age in the fifties. In 1963, the American Book Publishers Council declared Catcher the most consistently “damned” book in the entire country.[16] The bifurcated history of the novel in the sixties speaks to a fractured culture wherein youth saw in Holden an example of rhetoric with no clear political program and parents saw the same thing.

Eve Sedgwick once referenced black people coming out of the closet as black in the sixties.[17] She meant that in the sixties black people owned their blackness not by fighting an interior war or hiding from political engagement but by making their war public through a political and artistic program. If that is so, then unfortunately white people have never come out or even acknowledged whiteness as anything but normal and raceless. The sixties was a decade where the door became ajar and white folks could have come out of the closet as openly against white supremacy. People were pining to come out of the closet, and some certainly did. Throngs of people across America were certainly talking about coming out of the closet, getting high and talking about it.

As the civil rights movement raged on, The Catcher in the Rye enjoyed unparalleled popularity among college students. They saw in Holden a person like themselves, upset at the inequities of the social order and yet impotent at the same time. While many gains were made in the civil rights and black power movements and the women’s movement, like Holden, essentially white Americans stayed in the closet, unbeckoned by the false idols of the decade like the Rolling Stones, who, while capitalizing on the energy and spirit of the decade, refused to embrace the politics and truly lead. Like Holden and Elvis, the Rolling Stones could have emerged from the racial closet and embraced a multicultural identity that could have been the standard bearer, but like Salinger they said no and passed up on the opportunity to truly make a difference.

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