Anyone who has read J. D. Salinger's New Yorker stories - particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme - With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children. The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. 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. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
Salinger's classic coming-of-age story portrays one young man's funny and poignant experiences with life, love, and sex.
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Jerome David Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980.
Raised in Manhattan, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. Salinger published his first stories in Story magazine which was started by Whit Burnett. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year.
Biography
Jerome David Salinger, was born in New York City on Jan. 1, 1919, and established his reputation on the basis of a single novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), whose principal character, Holden Caulfield, epitomized the growing pains of a generation of high school and college students. The public attention that followed the success of the book led Salinger to move from New York to the remote hills of Cornish, New Hampshire. Before that he had published only a few short stories; one of them, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which appeared in The New Yorker in 1949, introduced readers to Seymour Glass, a character who subsequently figured in Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Salinger's only other published books. Of his 35 published short stories, those which Salinger wishes to preserve are collected in Nine Stories (1953).
Author biography copyright 1993, Grolier, Inc.
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Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 9
The Story Behind the Story 16
List of Characters 21
Summary and Analysis 25
Critical Views 43
Carl F. Strauch on The Complexity of Holden's Character 43
Robert M. Slabey on Christian Themes and Symbols 47
Jonathan Baumbach on Spirituality 50
John M. Howell on T.S. Eliot's Influence 54
Warren French on Holden's Search for Tranquility 60
Duane Edwards on Holden as the Unreliable Narrator 64
Gerald Rosen on the Relevance of Buddhism 69
Edwin Haviland Miller on Mourning Allie Caulfield 74
Christopher Brookeman on Cultural Codes at Pencey Prep 78
Sanford Pinsker on the Protagonist-Narrator 82
Paul Alexander on Inventing Holden Caulfield 86
Pamela Hunt Steinle on Holden as a Version of the American Adam 89
Matt Evertson on Holden Caulfield's Longing to Construct a New Home 94
Yasuhiro Takeuchi on the Carnivalesque 99
Works by J.D. Salinger 106
Annotated Bibliography 107
Contributors 117
Acknowledgments 120
Index 123
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对一个人来说,一辈子里注定会不时去寻找一些他们自身周围所不能提供的东西,要么他们以为自身的周围无法提供,所以放弃了寻找,他们甚至在还没有真正开始寻找前,就放弃了。 一个不成熟的人的标志是他愿意为了某个理由而轰轰烈烈地死去,而一个成熟的人的标志是他愿意为了某个理由而谦恭地活下去。
问题是我不喜欢这样,琢磨一下就会觉得这主意很馊。我觉得如果你并非真的喜欢一个女孩儿,就不该跟她瞎胡闹。真的喜欢她,就应该喜欢她的脸。如果你喜欢她的脸,就不应该对她的脸做出这种下流事,比方说往她脸上喷水
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