The Catcher In The Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

Item Number: 3574

Boston: Little Brown, 1951.

First edition of the author’s first book. Octavo, original black cloth. Near fine in the dust jacket which has had some professional restoration to the spine extremities. The dust jacket is the correct first issue with the cropping of Salinger’s head on the rear panel and the price on the front flap. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

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."