The ways are many but the end is one the old man used to say.
Jerome David Salinger affected young lives like few other modern writers have.
I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was 18 and have read it every 10 years since.
The liberating thing about it was that we could dare to begin to articulate the anger at all the little things we became aware of as young adults.
Before reading The Catcher in the Rye, we were all followers.
After reading The Catcher in the Rye, we found it ok to vent, emote and question our packaged, prep-school, adolescent lives.
Reading it as an older person, one is wiser and more grateful for it.
Is it the greatest literary masterpiece of all eternity? No.
But it belonged to us because we 'got it' when nobody else 'got' us.
Or so we thought...
"The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid" ---From DeDaumier-Smith's Blue Period
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