num_pages: 214
description: 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 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. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."  His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.
language: English
title: The Catcher in the Rye
titlecomplete: The Catcher in the Rye
characters: Sally Hayes, Holden Caulfield, Allie Caulfield, Stradlater, Robert Ackley, D.B Caulfield, Phoebe Caulfield
genres: Read For School, Coming Of Age, American, School, Novels, Young Adult, Literature, High School, Classics, Fiction
ratings_count: 3393514
places: New York City, New York, Agerstown, Pennsylvania
awards: awardedAt: 1262332800000
name: Teen Read Award
category: Best All-Time-Fave, awardedAt: -568051200000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction
publisher: Little, Brown