“A novel should have substance, should be coherent, should contain vivid characterization; and it is the better for a well-constructed plot,” wrote Thomas Francis Ritt in a 1951 book review for America. “This extended short story has none of these important attributes. In a word, it is not a novel. It is a story which becomes frightfully boring before one is halfway through the book. The story, or what there is of a story, could easily have been told in 5,000 words or less, and told more effectively.”

The author of the book in question had indeed achieved some literary fame for his short stories in The New Yorker and other journals, but America’s reviewer was disappointed with J. D. Salinger’s debut novel, The Catcher in the Rye:

It purports to tell the story of Holden Caulfield, who leaves (by request) a semi-private school and returns to the caverns of New York for a three-day binge. His encounters with the problems of living are told in a flip (and sometimes ferocious) manner which is not in the best of taste. Good writers have given us the smells and tastes of the prize ring without benefit of four-letter words. Mr. Salinger would have written a much more enjoyable book if he had left them where they are usually found—on the walls of latrines where “little boys” write them. Perhaps the best thing to be said about The Catcher in the Rye is that Mr. Salinger would do well to remain in the field of the short story. 

Ritt was no slouch himself as a writer or a public intellectual: He later served as the director of the Catholic Council on Civil Liberties and was an acquaintance of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. And he wasn’t alone in his dislike of the novel: Longtime America reviewer Riley Hughes criticized the book in Catholic World for its “formidably excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language,” and writing in The New Republic, Anne L. Goodman called it disappointing. “In a writer of Salinger’s undeniable talent,” she concluded, “one expects something more.” 

But most critics—and millions of Americans—disagreed with those takes on Holden Caulfield. In The New York Times, Nash K. Burger called Catcher in the Rye “unusually brilliant,” adding that “[t]his was a perilous undertaking, but one that has been successfully achieved” (In The Times the day before, James Stern had attempted an impossibly cringe paean to Salinger’s style with “Aw, the World’s a Crumby Place.”), and Burger’s plaudits were echoed by many reviewers of what became a best-selling novel within two weeks of its release on July 16, 1951, 75 years ago.

Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 in Manhattan and bounced around between various colleges before World War II. He sold a short story starring a dyspeptic teen by the name of Holden Caulfield to The New Yorker in 1941, though it didn’t appear for another five years. During the war, he served as a counterintelligence agent and was in the second wave of American troops to come ashore on D-Day in 1944. 

His big break as a writer came in 1948, when The New Yorker published his short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Catcher in the Rye followed three years later. An immediate bestseller, it soon also gained a reputation as a hipster bible of sorts and eventually found its way onto every high school English reading list in existence. It has sold over 10 million copies. Catcher is perhaps the closest thing we have as a culture to a universal literary touchstone. After all, we might have all been assigned Huckleberry Finn in school, but we actually read Catcher in the Rye, and not just the naughty bits. 

Salinger began withdrawing from public view in the years after Catcher, though his disappearing act was perhaps due more to religious or spiritual reasons than any desire to flee from the pressures of fame. A longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Salinger became an increasingly devoted follower of the Hindu religious leader Sri Ramakrishna—and his teachings on withdrawal from the world—in the 1950s. A curious connection to America was part of that religious journey: Salinger corresponded from 1953 until 1965 with an American-born Hindu monk, John Moffitt (known for many years as Swami Atmaghananda), who was hired as a copy editor at America in 1963 and later served for many years as the magazine’s poetry editor. (Moffitt called Salinger “Jerry.”)

His next book, the short story collection Nine Stories, found critical and commercial success upon its release in 1953, the same year Salinger left New York City for Cornish, N.H. In 1955, he married Claire Douglas, with whom he would have two children. The couple divorced in 1967, though remained friends and neighbors. Douglas would later describe Salinger as an endless spiritual seeker, navigating through religious and spiritual movements serious and not throughout the years. 

In 1961, Salinger gifted every future parent in Brooklyn with the names of their children when he published Franny and Zoey. That same year, he appeared on the cover of Time. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction appeared two years later, and in 1965 The New Yorker published a long Salinger short story, “Hapworth 16, 1924.” And then…nothing. Though his friends and family (and occasional lovers) reported that he continued to write throughout his life, he published no new material in the 45 years until his death in 2010.

Salinger was fiercely and famously private about his personal life, resorting regularly to legal means as a way to block biographies, profiles and other materials related to his life or writing. In 2019, his widow and third wife, Colleen O’Neill Zakrzeski Salinger, and his son Matthew announced that all his unpublished materials would eventually be released—but that, too, was seven years ago.

As for America, the magazine more or less atoned over the years for its initial dismissal of Catcher in the Rye. As early as 1963, Francis E. Kearns wrote in the magazine that Catcher was  “the most influential work in the literary initiation of the American undergraduate.” In 1988, longtime America contributor William J. O’Malley, S.J., noted that despite Salinger’s appeal to the American counterculture in the 1960s and beyond, Holden Caulfield is actually a better representative of their predecessors. “In all the years I’ve been teaching, there’s been no book that can more easily make a boy say, ‘Wow!’ than J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye,” he wrote. “‘God!’ they gasp. ‘That’s exactly how it is!’ But then they’re somewhat taken aback when I tell them that this year both Holden Caulfield and I celebrated our 56th birthdays. Catcher was written about my generation.”

In a column for America in 1999, the famous psychiatrist and author Robert Coles (who died earlier this year) suggested that Holden Caulfield was something in between the nation’s Everyman and its literary messiah. Readers rooted for him, Coles wrote, hoping “he would prevail. And so doing he would leave the rest of us clear-headed, as a consequence of his brave jousts with powerful hypocrisy and his mental unmasking of pretense. What he dared see (see through) we could consider our own property. Hence our own consequent clean candor.” Well, maybe. 

And what of the novel’s famous use of f-bombs and its frank depiction of sexual immorality, causing it in the decades since to be banned from many a library or school district’s reading list? Salinger found an unlikely defender on this score: America’s notoriously exacting literary editor, Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. 

Father Gardiner (who really deserves his own biography) was something of a literary legend in mid-20th century American literature for his vast knowledge, cutting rhetorical style and impenetrable sense of authority. (He once offended Flannery O’Connor by editing out a paragraph from an essay she wrote for America and replacing it with one he wrote himself.) I sometimes suspect that he hated everything but mom and apple pie, and even considered the latter a bit too tart. 

Among his targets over the years were Frederich Buechner, James Michener, John Steinbeck and more; all were pilloried by his merciless pen. Are you a fan of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a screen adaptation of which is airing this week on Netflix? Then don’t read Gardiner’s review of the classic 1952 novel. “What makes this huge novel so strangely readable I just don’t know,” Father Gardiner wrote. “It is a mishmash of sensitive appreciation of nature, admiration for the pioneering spirit, biographies of the author’s own family, sincere but often phony philosophizing, melodrama, crudity and tenderness.”

But like Flannery O’Connor, Father Gardiner was also aware of the pernicious effects that “the Catholic Philistines” could have on literature, fainting at the thought of sin and turning everything into a treacly moral treatise. In a 1961 essay noting the 10th anniversary of the publication of Catcher in the Rye, Father Gardiner defended a writer’s prerogative to show life as it was—and an educator’s right to expose students to a raunchy scene or two:

False consciences, seeing sin where there objectively is none, afflict many who never will confront these problems in literature. There is such a thing as the lovely delicate conscience, but scrupulosity is the ape of delicacy. The teacher will respect and cherish the true delicacy of pupils’ consciences. One way of doing exactly that is to help the pupil to develop a clear-sighted spiritual poise that will not be unduly horrified by the language that has caused such a really needless furore over books like The Catcher in the Rye.

One thing Father Gardiner and Holden Caulfield had in common: Neither had any time for phonies. 

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Liturgy in the Glow,” by David Anson Lee. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.