A collection of brilliant, sad, and influential stories that includes favorites like "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "Teddy," and "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor," as well as the underrated gem, "Just Before the War With the Eskimos." Almost invariably, Salinger's tormented characters are trying to search for some sort of peace within a hell that...more
Ever since it was first published in 1951, this novel has been the coming-of-age story against which all others are judged. Read and cherished by generations, the story of Holden Caulfield is truly one of America's literary treasures.
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins, "If you really w...more