UM: J.D. Salinger

In the wake of author J.D. Salinger’s death this week, the PBS Newshour looks at the legacy of his novel, “Catcher in the Rye.” The report includes commentary by UM professor Nicholas Delbanco: “The novel bears a certain degree of lineage from kinship to Huck Finn … the voice in the opening beat announces early on and absolutely authoritatively that we’re in the presence of not so much an outcast of society as someone who hasn’t yet found his comfortable place within it, who looks at it keenly, though, through the eyes of an adolescent, and who is, you know, preternaturally alert to that repeated word phoniness.” [Source]