In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. By Pamela Hunt Steinle. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. x, 238 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-8142-0848-7.)

John Arthur Maynard, In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. By Pamela Hunt Steinle. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. x, 238 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-8142-0848-7.), Journal of American History, Volume 89, Issue 2, September 2002, Pages 714–715, https://doi.org/10.2307/3092308

Extract

What is it about Holden Caulfield? Why is the hero of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) still as irritating, disturbing, challenging, and, for some, as worrisome and cen-sorable as ever?

More than fifty years after its publication, as the American studies specialist Pamela Hunt Steinle points out, Catcher is still the most assigned and most censored book in America. The enduring issue about Holden himself, for both his fans and those who fear him, is best summed up in that all-purpose buzzword of the present decade, attitude. Cynical, profane, and constantly griping, sixteen-year-old Holden seems to respect nothing. Yet, as Professor Steinle notes, his values are really pretty conventional, and they are also deeply held; what makes him angry is that no one seems to live up to them.

In Cold Fear makes its most solid contribution to history when the author cites the testimony she herself has gathered from a number of would-be censors. After identifying seventy-six separate attempts to censor Catcher in the 1960s and 1980s, she zeroed in on three— in Marin County, California (1960–1961), Albuquerque, New Mexico (1968), and Cal-houn County, Alabama (1982–1983)—then tracked down some of the major participants and interviewed them at length. In each case, the would-be censors had joined organized efforts to remove the book from high school reading lists. Why? Because Catcher presented a “negative” view of the world that they did not want their children to adopt. The issue was not the right of free expression but the power to assign. The disagreement was over “what ‘truth’ ought to be shared with adolescents.” The fear was that Holden Caulfield would persuade people as young as he to have no values at all—and that America was already well advanced in that direction. On the other hand, even when they lost, as they normally did, a surprising number of disappointed censors seem to have thought the struggle had been worthwhile after all, if only as a rare exercise in democracy.