The Catcher in The Rye
Salinger, J.D.
Blue Valley Sophomore Communication Arts classes
The main character in The Catcher in the Rye is a 16-year-old New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. The story takes place in the 40s, and the book follows Holden's random wanderings in New York for three days after he is kicked out of his third prep school for failing grades.
The book employs a pervasive amount of profanity -- over 700 occurences. The story also includes scenes where Holden hires a prostitute, fantasizes about commiting suicide, plots how he would kill his enemies, escapes a homosexual advance from a male teacher, and idolizes a fellow student who does commit suicide.
According to the American Library Association, this book was the thirteenth most challenged in the 1990s.
Click here to read about controversy that the book created in a high school at North Berwick, Maine, and here to read a followup editorial.
Profane words used in the 277-page Catcher in the Rye:
hell 249
goddam 186
damn 113
faggy 1
ass 26
butt 2
bull 6
bitch 2
bastard 60
Chrissake 25
God (in vain) 32
Sonovabitch 15
Jesus Christ (in vain) 6
whore 5
fuck 6
The following quotes are from pabbis.com Parents Against Bad Books in Schools. This particular passage is from the 27 November 2003 news posting that included a discusion of Catcher in the Rye. click here for the posting in its entirety.
"A high school English teacher in Fairfax County, VA instructed his class that, for homework, they should repeat a certain "profanity 10,000 times as a way of desensitizing them to its appearance in the novel Catcher in the Rye."
The student described the incident this way:
"Recently in my English Class we were given the assignment to go home and repeat the phrase, "f*** you" 10,000 times. As you can probably guess this sent the class into complete shock, then laughter erupted. We asked our teacher if he was serious, and he exclaimed that of course he was and that if we said it enough we would become desensitized to the phrase and it would become meaningless to us."