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Holden at sixteen.

Article Excerpt
It was 1964 and I was fourteen when I first read The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. After considering the last bit of what Holden Caulfield had to say to me--"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody"--I decided this was the second-best book I'd ever found, after Robert Ruark's Something of Value. And found is the right word: I had picked Holden's tale from the rather cheesy paperback rack at Packett's Pharmacy during my endless browses there, choosing it over Leonard Wibberley's The Mouse That Roared (not about mice) and George Orwell's Animal Farm (not about animals or farming), because Catcher seemed much stranger. Strange was good.

I felt pretty serious about bestowing my No. 2 all-time honor on Salinger--the man ought to feel honored. Nobody I knew took books as seriously as I did, except my dad, but he read only Harold Robbins and Erle Stanley Gardner and James Michener. Alas for Pops: I felt The Catcher in the Rye was simply too much book for him. He was better off tucking up with Perry Mason in that attorney's predictable murder courtroom, or with Mr. Michener in Hawaii, than he would be trying to hang with old Holden in his goddam prep school, or his dive New York City hotel, or his little sister's room--good old Phoebe--after midnight.

So I did not recommend Catcher to my dad, though I owed him one for his urging me to read The Carpetbaggers. It would not have been fair. One could not expect adults to handle the kind of rough stuff Holden was laying down.

Ah, well. Little did I know what I would soon find out--that I was measurably...

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