The way it’s usually taught in high school is deeply flawed: “Holden is a whiner, and he’s an unreliable misanthrope, just like a lot of you, my students, who I now better understand.”

How I came to it as an adult: Holden is clinically depressed, and is actually journaling from the residential house where he’s been institutionalized. I know several families whose kids “spent a semester at school in Utah” and yeah … that’s this. And the reason for his depression is in there, still so painful he can only barely discuss it: it’s grief for the death of his beloved baby brother. Oh, and he was probably molested, that’s in there too.

Back when “how to teach” this book was established, American classrooms simply didn’t discuss depression nor sexual-abuse trauma and its manifestations as fluently as we do now. This book is a triumph in how it communicates that, though it largely fell on deaf ears for a generation.