Every year, when I taught THE CATCHER IN THE RYE to my ninth graders, my kids finished it overnight and always said, "I didn't know you could write like this." Salinger was so open, so close to the bone. So conversational. Holden wrote "to" someone he'd never met as if he were talking to someone he'd always known. Holden could tell a secret publicly and it would still be a private secret. He revealed the most profound emotions in the simplest language; in fact, it was more effective to do it like that because then the writer got out of the reader's way. The smallest gestures could reveal all you really needed to know about a character. Humor and pain could exist on the page beside each other, if not inside each other.

CATCHER is a literary aphrodisiac. Every time I read it, I know that Salinger wrote it just for me. The stream of consciousness, Holden's intense vision of the world as a haunting and haunted place, the cynicism, the truth, the sorrow - all of it still blows me away. Every time I read CATCHER I have a sense that as a reader and as a person, I am known and revealed.

CATCHER is a coming of age story, but it's really so much more. It is the revelation of the power of a single voice. The plot itself, the journey of one teenage boy, is less important than the emotion and the unique humanity. Reading this book becomes an act of intimacy. Clearly, Holden already knew me and my students far better than anyone else did. Reading CATCHER was understanding the power of fiction.

Can you imagine? In 1971, I had to justify CATCHER TO Dr. Edgar, the Superintendent of Schools in Greenwich; there were so many parent complaints about my teaching such a dirty book to ninth graders. Kim Bonheim and I bonded over CATCHER; Joan DeLuca and I have never stopped talking about Salinger. When Taylor Craig was all grown up and in a book group, she called me discuss CATCHER with her and her friends. When I finished reading CROSSING TO SAFETY during one Christmas vacation, I wished that Wallace Stegner were a great friend of mine, so I wrote to him, quoted Holden, and Stegner and I had a lovely correspondence til he died. My copy of CATCHER is composed of individual pages: it's beyond binding, and the elastic band that holds it all together has to be replaced every few months. Some day I'll put it in the safe deposit box. I hope that it will end up in the hands of Kim or Joan or Taylor.