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Over the course of 3 days, a rich kid who can not stop getting expelled from every college he attends wanders around Manhattan trying to get (1) drunk and (2) lucky. No, it's not the storyline of an unreleased Gossip Girl season (RIP). It is the storyline of Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger's beloved, prohibited, reviled, worshiped, and--well, let us just say polarizing 1951 novel about a depressed prep school boy with a heart of gold.

After rocketing almost immediately to the top of the bestseller lists, The Catcher in the Rye began its run on the banned books list. Not that we are surprised by this (profanity, sex, alcohol abuse, prostitution--need we go on?) , but we're a little surprised that it's also so common in high school English classes. Is there's something more going on than the ramblings of a depressed and admittedly immature sixteen- or seventeen-year-old?

Boy (as Holden would say) is there.

Reaching all the way back to the coming-of-age Bildungsroman tradition, The Catcher in the Rye is a book about a teenager trying to find a way to be true to himself while growing up in a world full of phonies--and a book about post-World War II America burrowing into the "phoniness" of consumerism when attempting to pretend that the injury of the atomic bomb did not happen. No wonder The Catcher in the Rye ended up as a sign of alienation and isolation for the disillusioned and restless post-war generation.

And then there's J. D. Salinger himself, who stopped publishing and essentially disappeared from public view at the peak of his profession--almost like he was a sort of Holden Caulfield. So, is Holden really a stand-in for Salinger himself? What really happened between his three days from New York along with his "rest" out West?

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