Why Catcher in the Rye Still Resonates 75 Years Later

JD Salinger's perennial teen rebel is hitting a milestone birthday that he'd almost certainly roll his eyes at. The Catcher in the Rye turned 75 on July 16—still banned in some schools, still beloved by generations of readers, and still uncannily in step with a culture obsessed with "authenticity" and allergic to phoniness, per the New York Times. The New York City-set novel, never adapted for film despite repeated Hollywood attempts, has sold more than 80 million copies, spawned translations from Azerbaijani to Vietnamese, and inspired everyone from playwright John Guare to Guns N' Roses—along with a disturbing handful of 1980s gunmen who clung to it for all the wrong reasons, including Mark David Chapman, who fatally shot John Lennon.

The book's prostitutes, pimps, drunkenness, bodily functions, and trove of now-archaic slang once scandalized parents and still animates debates over whether narrator Holden Caulfield is an incisive portrait of adolescent alienation or a dated emblem of white male angst. Salinger, who battled his own trauma after WWII and later retreated to New Hampshire, guarded his privacy and work so fiercely that Catcher wasn't digitized until years after his 2010 death. Yet, as new generations of readers meet Holden and his resistance to growing up, the 1951 tome keeps its place as a contender for the Great American Novel. Six writers reflect on the novel's legacy for the Los Angeles Times, while the Guardian offers 10 things you should know about it. Literary Hub, meanwhile, features some of the book's original reviews, while the Atlantic touches on its "surprisingly hopeful—and ethical—outlook."