Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been
synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple
of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep
school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned
book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want
to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how
my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David
Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want
to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second
place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything
pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to
phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence
of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

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