Protecting Holden Caulfield and His Friends from the Censors

Abstract

ters, 1 individuals and groups occasionally protested Holden's presence in schools. In a few communities, teachers fired for teaching Salinger's novel. In others, teachers admonished never to bring that kind of trash into their classrooms again, and their future literary selections carefully monitored. In the majority of instances, however, those teachers who were brave enough to teach The Catcher in the Rye because they thought it was a very fine novel did so without protest, without negative comment, without any interference.2 Such is the nature of schoolbook protest in America. No one can predict how any one community will respond to any novel, textbook, short story, poem, or play. No one can foretell what will precipitate the next censorship incident or how explosive it will be. No one can outguess the selfappointed guardians of the young who have formed hundreds of organizations that want to rid the schools of all they deem to be anti-God, antimoral, anti-family, anti-free enterprise, and antiAmerican.3