Suffern High School ’59 and Holden Caulfield

The New Yorker senior editor and staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg writes about receiving Catcher In The Rye as assigned reading when he was a junior at Suffern High School in a 2/17 blog post on The New Yorker’s Website.

My eleventh-grade clique at Suffern High School, in a corner of Rockland County, New York…was in transition from post-Civil War rural to pre-Vietnam War suburban. The year was 1959.

A few days later an authority figure at the school collected all of the copies of Catcher in the Rye declaring “a mistake has been made.” Hertzberg tells about how that event affected his Rockland County school campus back when a book like Catcher was scandalous — and the Tappan Zee Bridge was only three years old.

Source: The New Yorker Blog, 2/17/2010