Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Salinger, J. D. - Kerry McSweeney （essay date Spring 1978）

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Kerry McSweeney （essay date Spring 1978）

SOURCE: “Salinger Revisited,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 61-8.

[In the following essay, McSweeney offers a reevaluation of Salinger's fiction and critical reception. According to McSweeney, “The only work of Salinger's that has not shrunk with the passage of time is The Catcher in the Rye.”]

For anyone who was a literate North-American adolescent during the 1950s, it is probably difficult, even after fifteen or twenty years, to go beyond a personal estimate and/or historical estimate of the fiction of J. D. Salinger and attempt a ‘real’ estimate. The task will be especially difficult for those who were in those days uncritical enthusiasts of Nine Stories, The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass stories; for a retrospective distaste and embarrassment over one's youthful intensities, idealisings and over-simplifications may well make for...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Anne Marple （review date 18 September 1961）
   2. J. D. O'Hara （essay date Winter 1963-1964）
   3. Bernice and Sanford Goldstein （essay date Autumn 1966）
   4. Kerry McSweeney （essay date Spring 1978）
   5. Edwin Haviland Miller （essay date Winter 1982）
   6. Sanford Pinsker （essay date Winter 1986）
   7. Max F. Schulz （essay date 1987）
   8. Helen Weinberg （essay date 1987）
   9. John Wenke （essay date 1987）
   10. Terry Teachout （essay date September 1987）
   11. Joyce Rowe （essay date 1991）
   12. Peter Shaw （essay date 1991）
   13. Pamela Steinle （essay date 1991）
   14. Susan K. Mitchell （essay date December 1992）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. J. D. Salinger