Рита Райт-Ковалева Ordre des livres (chronologique)

The hero-narrator is a sixteen-year-old native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. He leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and spends three days underground in New York City. Holden is both simple and complex, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about him or his story. He is captivated by beauty, almost to the point of being overwhelmed by it. The novel features various voices—children's, adults', and underground—but Holden's voice stands out as the most eloquent. He expresses a poignant blend of pain and pleasure, transcending his vernacular while remaining true to it. Most of his pain is kept to himself, while he shares the pleasure with the reader who can appreciate it. J.D. Salinger's classic tale of teenage angst and rebellion was published in 1951 and has been recognized as one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has faced challenges for its use of profanity and depiction of sexuality, becoming a must-read for teenage boys in the 1950s and 60s.

The short story, <i>Franny</i>, takes place in an unnamed college town and tells the tale of an undergraduate who is becoming disenchanted with the selfishness and inauthenticity she perceives all around her. The novella, <i>Zooey</i>, is named for Zooey Glass, the second-youngest member of the Glass family. As his younger sister, Franny, suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown in her parents' Manhattan living room -- leaving Bessie, her mother, deeply concerned -- Zooey comes to her aid, offering what he thinks is brotherly love, understanding, and words of sage advice. Salinger writes of these works: <i>"FRANNY came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by ZOOEY. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill."</i>