The Wind and The Rain: An Easter Book For 1962.

BRAYBROOKE, Neville. [J.D. Salinger].

$2,800.00

Item Number: 139746

London: Seeker & Warburg, 1962.

First edition of Braybrooke’s “Easter book” of modern literature. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the editor on the front free endpaper, “To: J.D. Salinger, with best wishes, and with admiration, Neville Braybrooke.” The recipient, J.D. Salinger remains best known for his classic novel The Catcher in the Rye and its memorable cynical adolescent protagonist Holden Caulfield. Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States yet in 1981, it was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States. Early challengers of the book criticized young protagonist Holden Caulfield’s vulgar language and it was soon accused of undermining family values, encouraging rebellion in teenagers, and promoting drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity. The novel was included on Time Magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923 and approximately one million copies of The Catcher in the Rye are sold each year, with total sales of more than 65 million books. In a contributor’s note Salinger sent to Harper’s Magazine in 1946, he wrote: “I almost always write about very young people,” a statement that has been referred to as his credo. Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger’s work, from his first published short story, “The Young Folks” (1940), to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger’s choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was “a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world.” For this reason, Norman Mailer once remarked that Salinger was “the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by P.W. Branfield. Wood engraving by Joan Hassell.

Many will remember the literary quarterly The Wind and the Rain which, founded in 1940 by a group of six schoolboys, flourished for 11 years, and whose contributors included Arthur Machen, Nicolas Berdyaev, Jean Cocteau, W.H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, and William Sansom. T. S. Eliot scholar and poet Neville Braybrooke was its editor and revived it in the form of this Easter Book. The chief aim of the original quarterly was to "interpret the Christian order in the light of current affairs, philosophy, literature and the arts."