Great Valley High School

 

• Here is a Background PowerPoint that includes information regarding the book, its characters, and the author.
• Critical Literary Articles
  • "None of the David Copperfield Crap"
  • "To Tell You The Truth"
  • "The Saint as a Young Man"
  • "The Symbolic Structure of The Catcher in the Rye"
  • "Salinger's Depiction of Trauma in The Catcher in the Rye"
  • "A Study on the Painful Transition of Adolescence"

• There are anentire Slang Dictionaries.  
• http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wrader/slang/recent.html   Much of what Holden says would fit in there.  (Shockingly it's blocked by the school, categorized as "Obscene/Tasteless."  Yikes. 
• Slang is specific to time and place…50 years from nowpeople are really going to wonder what we were talking about.  Think about some rap lyrics…are they going tobe understood?  If you leave here, yourlanguage becomes something that identifies you. 

Why hasn't it ever been made into a movie?  Let Salinger explain it himself.  Here is a letter written in 1957 by Mr. Salinger to a Mr. Herbert regarding a request to make a movie out of his story.  Salinger's major argument?  It's "unactable." 

Want to read and know more?

 

Here is Time Magazine's take on things (the continuation of the article you read for HW).  The side bar links and articles are also very interesting.

 

Letters to Salinger - Though Salinger has passed away, during his time of seclusion, thousands of students and readers submitted letters to him or to others reading the book.  Some admire him; others eviscerate him.  Check them out, and if you want, submit one to the webmaster.  I have no idea what he'll do now that Salinger is gone, but it could be fun to test out!

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