''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.''

The first of J. D. Salinger''s four books to be published, The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most widely read and beloved of all contemporary American novels.

''The handbook of the adolescent heart'' The New Yorker