‘I felt Holden was talking to me alone’: The Catcher in the Rye at 75

JD Salinger’s wry, subversive classic inspired novelist Joseph O’Connor to be a writer. He reflects on why this story of a disaffected teenager remains as fresh and transgressive as ever In 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her dad’s favourite novel. I’d never heard of it despite living in a home full of books. My parents loved the work of Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Dickens. So did I. But encountering the first sentence of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made the world burst into colour. “If you really want to hear abo

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