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.