The Catcher In The Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

Item Number: 54090

Boston: Little Brown, 1951.

File folder envelope hand-written and addressed by J.D. Salinger to fellow writer and friend Eli Waldron. The file folder was used as an envelope. Shipping and return address entirely in Salinger’s hand. Return address is from Salinger’s Vermont address and addressed to Mr. Eli Waldron. Postmarked 1965. The folder measures 12 inches by 9.5 inches. The recipient Eli Waldron was an American writer and journalist whose primary work consisted of short stories, essays, and poetry. His writings were published in literary journals (such as The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Story) and popular periodicals (such as Collier’s, Holiday, Rolling Stone, Saturday Evening Post). From the 1950s to 1970s he contributed stories and essays to The New Yorker, and in the 1960s and 1970s. Waldron moved to Charlton Street in New York City in 1947 and became part of a literary circle that included Hollis Alpert, Josephine Herbst, S. J. Perelman, and J. D. Salinger. Following the publication in July 1951, of his review of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger wrote his reviewer a warm note of thanks, adding: “I hope one day somebody writes with that much perception and feeling about a book of yours.” With the copy of Catcher in the Rye, which was sent to Waldron.

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."