The Catcher In The Rye.

SALINGER, J.D.

Item Number: 119419

Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1951.

First book club edition of the author’s first book. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. From the library of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis with her bookplate to the pastedown. Jacket design by Michael Mitchell. Photograph of Salinger by Lotte Jacobi. An exceptional example with noted provenance.

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."