The Catcher in the Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

$25,000.00

Item Number: 145286

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.

First edition of Salinger’s debut novel, a cherished portrait of adolescence and one of the most widely banned books ever published. Octavo, original black cloth with gilt-lettered spine. Near fine in a very good first issue dust jacket with the rear panel photograph of Salinger. Jacket design by Michael Mitchell. Author photograph by Lotte Jacob. With an autograph postcard signed by J.D. Salinger to his daughter Peggy laid in. The postcard bears a plastichrome image of horsedrawn carriages on 59th Street in New York City, inscribed by J.D. Salinger on the verso, “Peggy Sweetheart, Cartes and Sudie want to go for a ride on this carriage but I think we’d better wait for Peggy and Mama. Here is a kiss X. Here is a crab kiss ↃC xxx Love, Daddy.” Postmarked New York, New York May 4 11:30 AM 1959. In February 1955, at age 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student who was art critic Robert Langton Douglas’s daughter. They had two children, Margaret Salinger (also known as Peggy – born December 10, 1955) and Matthew “Matt” Salinger (born February 13, 1960). Peggy Salinger wrote in her memoir, Dream Catcher, that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, had her father not read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the “householder” (a married person with children). After their marriage, Salinger and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya yoga, the first of several of Salinger’s ever-changing spiritual belief systems which also included Dianetics. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable with such a touching postcard from Salinger to his only daughter.

"The Catcher in the Rye is undoubtedly a 20th-century classic. It struck a popular note, particularly with young readers, who strongly identified with Holden Caulfield and his yearning for lost innocence… Salinger's novel was, and continues to be, a phenomenal success" (Parker, 300). "This novel is a key-work of the 1950s in that the theme of youthful rebellion is first adumbrated in it, though the hero, Holden Caulfield, is more a gentle voice of protest, unprevailing in the noise, than a militant world-changer… The Catcher in the Rye was a symptom of a need, after a ghastly war and during a ghastly pseudo-peace, for the young to raise a voice of protest against the failures of the adult world. The young used many voices— anger, contempt, self-pity— but the quietest, that of a decent perplexed American adolescent, proved the most telling" (Burgess, 99 Novels, 53-4).