Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Salinger, J. D. - Pamela Steinle （essay date 1991）

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Pamela Steinle （essay date 1991）

SOURCE: “‘If a Body Catch a Body’: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Debate as Expression of Nuclear Culture,” in Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, edited by Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett, State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 127-36.

[In the following essay, Steinle examines the censorship debate surrounding The Catcher in the Rye and the novel's portrayal of American ideals and postwar social reality. Steinle writes, “It is this fear of nuclear holocaust, not the fear of four-letter words, that I believe is at the heart of the Catcher debate.”]

In 1951, the American public was introduced to 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, the narrator and central character of J. D. Salinger's first and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Described in early reviews as “an unusually sensitive and intelligent boy” and as “unbalanced as a...

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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