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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9458192" data-attributes="member: 7035894">As someone who has taught Catcher in the Rye, I feel that it is a great book, very much of its time, hugely culturally significant, and your characterization of its critics as "whiny kids" has a lot to do with why many younger readers might dislike it. Especially when wielded by an old Gen-Xer like me, you have to be careful not to be "adult-splaining" teenagers to, well, teenagers.Especially when the book is from a different time. Like, not all teenagers are troubled, wealthy, white, private school boys from 1940s Manhattan who panic when they see an F-bomb. I really love Salinger's writing, what little he published, but the guy was a mess with a very idiosyncratic view of the world. Catcher in the Rye did help invent the concept of the teenager in a significant way, though. For good and, often, bad.I can see why actual teens would be resentful.Edit: when I have taught it, I have done so in the context of an entire unit on the teenager industrial complex, situating it in the rise of teen-oriented media of the mid-20th century that was frequently exploitative. That one book contributed greatly to our ongoing conception of teens as a distinct and problematic demographic. We study how teenagers didn't really exist until the 20th century, and all of the baggage that the term has acquired over the past century.I don't think you can really understand that book unless you study it in the context of the rise of public education, which essentially forced the creation of teenage culture, the rise of mass media that responded to and contributed to the codification of that culture, and the economic boom in the United States that made adolescents a coveted market.So in Catcher in the Rye you see a phenomenally successful (in the sense of being phenomenally popular and influential) attempt by an adult to understand and codify a newly emergent cultural phenomenon, the American white male teenager.But also a very successful novel with a compellingly written and memorable protagonist.</blockquote>

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