/lit/ - Literature

I challenge you to write about yourself (in the first person) WITHOUT sounding like Catcher in the Rye

And then people give book recommendations based on the author's voice. However, everyone just ends up sounding like Saligner with this challenge

>>15349819
>>15349875
>>15349877
>>15349885
Look, in order to really "get" this book you've got to be familiar with the circumstances of its composition.

At the time of writing it, Salinger was potentially facing felony rape charges from the mother of a little girl named Alice Turnell. The mother was sure that Salinger was not only the rapist but also the murderer of her daughter. There was a great deal of circumstantial evidence that wasn't in Salinger's favor. One of Alice's dresses being found under his mattress, bloodied scissors found in his garbage etc. So Mrs. Turnell had been harassing Salinger for months with the threat of refusing to settle in any courts but the highest, and it was only due to Salinger's Masonic connections that such charges never came to fruition.

Did Salinger write The Catcher in the Rye as a way of coping with his own personal dilemmas of the time, as a means of staving off the madness that Mrs. Turnell was fueling and trying to break Salinger's mental health with? Possibly. One has to ask: what sort of man would write a book where the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is not only a mental hospital patient (something that Salinger himself was flirting with at the time of the books composition) and a cannibal, but also the rapist of his own little sister?

Obviously this whole aspect of The Catcher in the Rye has been quietly swept out of sight by academia but the full history is fairly easy to trace, if you go to the right local libraries that still have the news articles documenting the drama.

I believe Salinger was sort of a demented madman genius. Did he really anally rape and murder Alice Turnell and then attempt to exponge his demons through the cathartic writing of a full confession thinly disguised as a novel? Was it really Salinger carrying out a Masonic initiation rite so that he could at last be admitted into the clandestine Lodge of Perpetual Ishtar? To me it is inconsequential. The fact is, Salinger wrote one of the greatest books of the 20th century, and whatever might have driven him to do so must be, when all is considered, excused.