Jonathan Yardley speculates on why J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is so popular with high school English teachers:

Viewed from the vantage point of half a century, the novel raises more questions than it answers. Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as "a symbol of purity and sensitivity" (as "The Oxford Companion to American Literature" puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

That last question actually is easily answered: "The Catcher in the Rye" can be fobbed off on kids as a book about themselves. It is required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought. Like that other (albeit marginally better) novel about lachrymose preppies, John Knowles's "A Separate Peace" (1960), "The Catcher in the Rye" touches adolescents' emotional buttons without putting their minds to work. It's easy for them, which makes it easy for teacher.

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From first page to last, "The Catcher in the Rye" is an exercise in button-pushing, and the biggest button it pushes is the adolescent's uncertainty and insecurity as he or she perches precariously between childhood, which is remembered fondly and wistfully, and adulthood, which is the great phony unknown. Indeed a case can be made that "The Catcher in the Rye" created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since. It was a short leap indeed from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Rebel Without a Cause" to Valley Girls to the multibillion-dollar industry that adolescent angst is today.

I'm finding it a fascinating exercise to return to novels that moved or fascinated me as a teenager, as a college student, as a grad student, not because those returns recreate--or even accurately recall--my initial responses to those novels, but because they almost always don't. Sometimes, it's a simple case of realizing that some work that was peddled to you by a teacher as Great Literature is actually embarrassingly badly conceived and painfully badly written (like Jack London's The Call of the Wild, which I first read in the seventh grade and which I had occasion to reread last spring); at others, it's more about registering, through one's shifting responses to a work, changes in oneself (I've written about Steinbeck's East of Eden and George Eliot's Middlemarch as examples of this).

I dutifully read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, with no sense whatsoever of the irony involved in dutifully reading a novel about the dangers of being thoughtlessly dutiful. I thought I was being subversive in reading it, because I had procured (from the public library no less) this forbidden, presumably dirty book (Salinger was not assigned in my school). I couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about; I was bored by the novel, but dutifully finished reading it anyway, I suppose so that I could say that I had. It wasn't an electrifying reading experience, but at least my teachers weren't trying to use the book to manipulate my understanding of my own adolescence.

Alternative assessments of Yardley's assessment of Salinger are at Bookslut, Maud Newton, and Old Hag.

Jean Kerr had the best response to this book I know (I paraphrase): "Holden Caulfield is misunderstood by everyone, especially me."

Now, I read "The Catcher in the Rye" at about age thirteen, which is just the right age to appreciate it. When I had to reread it twenty years later my sympathies were entirely with the adults around Holden.

I have spent some time substitute teaching so I've been in a lot of classrooms, and the book I see frequently that is even worse is S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders."

Most books I read and enjoyed as a pre-adult are ones I still go back to enjoy. Then again, they're also ones I read on my own rather than because someone ordered me to. My only quibble with Yardley's article is that the concepts of "adolescent" and "teenager" were already formed and being promoted well before Salinger came on the scene. But Catcher in the Rye is definitely a significant milestone in the downward spiral toward a nihilistic "we're all pathetic and screwed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

I don't think Catcher is badly written. It's very well written, and pushing buttons is much of what art is about (see Nabokov's Gogol). As a teacher, even if you are a good one, you shouldn't forget how school alienates some students.

I'm certainly one of those people who read Salinger's novel at the "right" age. I was in ninth grade, I was miserable, I was bursting with things to say, and I was in love with the teacher who handed me the book. So maybe my esteem for this volume -- with its maroon cover and yellow script, because yes, every encounter with the novel was that visceral -- is circumstantial. And yes, of course, I found pieces of myself in Holden -- does a reader's ability to identify with a character -- however sniveling -- make the novel weak? This book didn't teach me anything about being a spoiled rich kid with a bone to pick. But it awakened in me a love of language, of voice, and an irrepressible desire to write, and I have to think that's a potent argument against Yardley's assertion that the book is poorly executed. Years after I finished a masters in creative writing, I went back to the book to re-read it, to test my old love affair with Salinger, to find out whether it was what I remembered. In fact, to a writer's eye, it was even better the second time around, and not because of some sentimental love affair with Holden (or the parts of me therein), but for the power of his voice. So count me among those who fell for "squishy sentimentality," I guess, but fourteen years later, I'm still smitten.

Its all part of a conspiracy to inculcate a hatred of reading in boys.

1)Perhaps the popularity of the prep-school motif is due to the fact that so many American intellectuals are obsessed with class issues and with things European...Eaton would be preferable as a motif, but an American boarding school will do in a pinch.

2)I don't think Blackboard Jungle is comparable to "Catcher." (I'm referring to Evan Hunter's novel, not the movie based on it, which I don't remember very well). The kids are vocational-school guys, not preppies. And the story is told from the viewpoint of a teacher, not a kid. A much better book IMO, though quite dated...

I read Catcher in High School. My teacher loved it, said it was his fravorite book. He even told us how he had to hide it from his teachers. I thought at the time, and now 22 years later, that Holden was a whiny little imp who probably never got the beating he so richly needed.

Surely the whiny teenager lit goes back further than _Catcher_ by quite a bit- Hesse's _Damien_, from the 20's, is a great example of it, and _Sorrows of Young Werther_ (SP?) is perhaps the paradigm. I don't have much else to say about the quoted piece, but the idea that Salinger started this (as opposed, perhaps, to making it more popular) is pretty silly.

Holden Caulfield got more of a beating than he ever deserved. One of my prized posessions is the Salinger story in which Holden's brother learns that he had been reported missing in action in combat in the South Pacific.

Sorry but I read Catcher in the Rye in high school and hated it. I had to read it in college and hated it. I have tried several times since then to read it and still hated it.

There are few books that I keep on hand in case I have trouble getting to sleep. Catcher in the Rye is one and For Whom the Bell Tolls is another. Both have the ability to put me to sleep in about 5 pages. I love Hemingway's short stories and his novellas but For Whom the Bell Tolls always puts me to sleep as does Catcher.

I like Call of the Wild.

When I read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as a ninth or tenth grader (I think I read it for pleasure; I don't remember 'discussing' it in class), I was well aware of the ironic undertones--that Holden Caulfield is just as big a phony as all the phonies he protests. I don't think that this is a particularly subtle reading of the novel, and I do think it encourages students to think about what it means to protest authority, the meaningfulness of 'raging against the machine' if we are all implicated in larger systems, whether some forms of protest are less effective (and perhaps more self-indulgent) than others), and the question of how do we take a stand that's actually a position, not simply a reaction?

The reason for ...Catcher...being popular was the use of the "f***" word. It was the first time I had seen it in print. It did feel somewhat rebellious to read it. However, I felt then and still feel that the book is a load of self-absorptive nonsense.

Twice I tried to read Catcher but just couldn't stay with it.

I have been spoiled by reading books that actually are good but which never received any acclaim. In a coming-of-age-story example, try Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. The adults (not all of them human) are mostly competent and caring, but a few are downright evil. The two protagonists are not effortless geniuses but they're smarter and more resourceful than the average teen. At first the stakes seem to be only life-and-death but quickly go much higher.

In my book, literary acclaim is almost a Good-Housekeeping Seal Of Boredom guarantee. Exceptions too few to require all the fingers of one hand.

I don't like "The Catcher in the Rye," but, for all of American obsession with adolescence, aren't there adolescents who are truly troubled, squished by parental/school/peer authority, etc.? Is writing about the problems of such teenagers always inappropriately "therapeutic"? The problem, I think, is in blurring the line between those young people who are simply confused and those who are seriously troubled and the consequent implication that adolescent angst, no matter how severe, is always glamorous.

I hated that book. And =A Separate Peace=, and =Lord of the Flies=. The adolescent lit I enjoyed was sci-fi, and I complained to my teachers about the load of depressing novels and stories we were given to read. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I ever got to read non-depressing literature for English (epics, Pride and Prejudice, etc)

More adventure, dagnabbit, and less angst. Of course, I hated Hemingway, too, but he was less putrid than Salinger.

"The adolescent lit I enjoyed was sci-fi..."

Last year the kid read "Screamers", which is a B-grade SF novel from the 50's, no relation to the movie. Her comment when she finished was "Why can't we read cool books like this for school?"

She's in AP English Lit this year, and so far has disliked almost everything they've had to read. "Hamlet" was OK, of course, but the Norton Critical Edition (required) contains an essay that reads Hamlet as Oedipus and that got on her nerves. "Not everything is about sex!" I'm just waiting for Virginia Woolf next semester. I think I'll want to be in another county.

I'm glad there are still old farts around like Yardley to criticize "Catcher in the Rye" for producing all those rebellious teens (a concept not invented by Salinger) so people reading it today can still get a kick out of reading something that pisses off the establishment. "Catcher" poorly written? Holden Calufield didn't become a literary icon by being a nice guy who got along with the grownups, he is a great, absorbing, frustrating character, who speaks in his own lingo (BTW, who even knows today what '50s slang sounded like?) but that's the point. "Catcher in the Rye" is awesome, end of story.

On December 8, 1980, immmediately after Mark Chapman emptied his .38 pistol into John Lennon's back, he dropped the gun, pulled out a copy of--guess what?--Catcher in the Rye, and began reading. Later psychiatric examinations extracted a sort-of grudge that Chapman had against Lennon: the Beatles founder, who sang about peace and a world with "no possessions," was, said Chapman, "a phony."

Did Chapman murder Lennon because of Salinger's novel? Of course not--but Yardley's right about the book's encouraging (or, as the academics would say, "valorizing") a certain kind of callow complaint against phoniness. While Salinger can't be held responsible for unleashing this into the world--it was there before he wrote about it--we'd all be better off if English teachers didn't reflexively direct their students to read this shabby knockoff of "existential" fiction. Have them read "Notes from Underground" instead.

I read Catcher in high school and did not experience it as therapy. Holden was more of a comic figure to me than anything else. He killed me! What a well-rendered character! Whatever anyone thinks of Holden's trials, I would argue that it is difficult to forget Holden himself (and that hat!).....this is what makes the book "literature" in my opinion. I have read the book every few years since highschool and will probably read it many more times before I die.

I don't really remember reading anything in high school that I enjoyed reading, and the only book from high school that really had an effect on me was "All Quiet on the Western Front".