The story begins at Pencey Preparatory Academy, an elite boarding school in the fictional town of Aggerstown Pennsylvania, where he has been expelled after failing all his classes, except English.

Fed up with the "phonies" at Pencey Prep, Holden decides to catch a train to New York, planning to stay away from his home until Wednesday, when his parents will have received notification of his expulsion.

As his parents return home, he slips out and visits his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who expresses concern that Holden is headed for "a terrible fall".

In the morning, having lost hope of ever finding meaningful connection in the city, he decides to head out West to live as a deaf-mute gas station attendant in a log cabin.

He alludes to encountering his parents that night and "getting sick" and being sent to a sanatorium in California near his older brother D.B mentioning that he will be attending another academy in September.

In November 1941 he sold the story "Slight Rebellion off Madison", which featured Holden Caulfield, to The New Yorker, but it was not published until December 21, 1946, due to World War II.

[14] The Catcher in the Rye is narrated in a subjective style from the point of view of Holden Caulfield, following his exact thought processes.

There is flow in the seemingly disjointed ideas and episodes; for example, as Holden sits in a chair in his dorm, minor events, such as picking up a book or looking at a table, unfold into discussions about experiences.

[15] Words and phrases that appear frequently include:[16] Bruce Brooks held that Holden's attitude remains unchanged at story's end, implying no maturation, thus differentiating the novel from young adult fiction.

[18] In contrast, Louis Menand thought that teachers assign the novel because of the optimistic ending, to teach adolescent readers that "alienation is just a phase.

[20] Peter Beidler in his A Reader's Companion to J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" identified the movie that the prostitute "Sunny" refers to.

for his writing skill (Holden's own best subject), but he also despises Hollywood industry-based movies, considering them the ultimate in "phony" as the writer has no space for his own imagination and describes D.B.

[25] This "catcher in the rye" is an analogy for Holden, who admires in children attributes that he often struggles to find in adults, like innocence, kindness, spontaneity, and generosity.

[26] In their biography of Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno argue that: "The Catcher in the Rye can best be understood as a disguised war novel."

Shortly after its publication, in an article for The New York Times, Nash K. Burger called it "an unusually brilliant novel,"[3] while James Stern wrote an admiring review of the book in a voice imitating Holden's.

"[31] In an appraisal of The Catcher in the Rye written after the death of J. D. Salinger, Jeff Pruchnic says the novel has retained its appeal for many generations.

Pruchnic describes Holden as a "teenage protagonist frozen midcentury but destined to be discovered by those of a similar age in every generation to come.

The book has had its share of naysayers, including the longtime Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who, in 2004, wrote that the experience of rereading the novel after several decades proved to be "a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil."

"Why," Yardley asked, "do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

[37] Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher who faced objections after assigning the novel in her class, noted that "the challengers are being just like Holden...

Lewis's meditations on Christianity by Gianni Versace's murderer Andrew Cunanan and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski – The Catcher in the Rye stands out in its devastating ability to influence without explicit instruction.

[56] When The Catcher in the Rye was first released, many offers were made to adapt it for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn, producer of My Foolish Heart.

Writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive attempts to snare the novel's rights: Of course I read The Catcher in the Rye...

Phyllis Westberg, who was Salinger's agent at Harold Ober Associates in New York, declined to say who the trustees are now that the author is dead.

Since there's an ever-looming possibility that I won't die rich, I toy very seriously with the idea of leaving the unsold rights to my wife and daughter as a kind of insurance policy.

Salinger also wrote that he believed his novel was not suitable for film treatment, and that translating Holden Caulfield's first-person narrative into voice-over and dialogue would be contrived.

[30][65] The novel's author, Fredrik Colting, commented: "call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books".