How Did The Time Period Affect Salinger's Life

Salinger’s time period affected The Catcher in the Rye by showing what it was like to be a teenager, albeit a rich, privileged one, soon after World War II (the book was published in 1951 and probably took place a couple years before) and right as the world was drastically changing from the advances and the alliances made during that time period. This, while not shown overtly throughout the text, is evidenced by Holden’s mentioning the atomic bomb and his older brother’s, D.B., time in the army and even being at D-Day. Holden would have been in some of his most formative years during the war, and this almost certainly had an effect on him. He would have seen men returning home from war, suffering from PTSD much like his brother, and wondered at the newsreels who were showing smiling men on the front when he knew for a fact that those same men would end in one of two places, waking up screaming from a nightmare or dead in the ground. It should be noticed that Salinger fought in World War II, and saw some of the bloodiest battlegrounds and was in fact one of the first people to go inside a liberated concentration camp, which almost certainly had an effect on him and provided a different picture of the war than the average solider, let alone the people back home. …show more content…
Often, as Holden does, a teenager can go from desperately wanting to achieve adulthood to dreading it. Regardless of anything they might want though, adulthood will happen. Holden seems to come to this conclusion towards the end of the novel, as he watches his little sister Phoebe ride the carousal. Salinger seems to be telling his readers through Holden that while protecting innocence as a good and noble goal to have, at some point, you have to let children grow into