J.D. Salinger

Even the WSWS appreciates him and especially Catcher in the Rye, as this essay makes clear:

One suspects that those who question Holden’s relevance are seeking to justify and legitimize modern-day hypocrisy and cynicism. In other words, they are defending the outlook and lifestyles of the “phonies” that Caulfield so despised. After all, publications like Time and the New York Times have done no small amount of work in building up one of the biggest latter-day “phonies”—the one who is to be found presently in the Oval Office.

There is more to the novel than the contrast of duplicity and authenticity, as important as that theme is. One cannot easily bring to mind another popular work of post-war fiction with so many scenes that remain imprinted on the reader’s mind for decades after last reading the novel: Holden’s recollection of holding a girl’s hand in a movie, his anxiety that his boorish roommate may have assaulted a young woman, his encounter with a prostitute whom he pays but does not sleep with, and, above all, the scenes with his sister Phoebe that reveal a real closeness (reinforced, one imagines, by the shared tragedy of their brother’s childhood death from leukemia). The lasting impact of such scenes is bound up with the fact that Holden is an intriguing character with a wide range of emotions on display; it does not take the reader long to discover a vulnerable—even despondent—side to his generally defiant posture.

Echoes of the novel’s story line and sensitivities are evident in some of the more interesting later works of popular American fiction and film, such as Ordinary People, Dead Poet’s Society, and The Squid and the Whale.