The Catcher In The Rye: An Analysis

While the woman was managing the home, the man was maneuvering through the workforce. The 1950’s saw a steadily increasing ratio between blue-collar to white-collar workers. These men were suits and fedoras, worked in dimly lit offices, and absent mindedly working to achieve success. Sloan Wilson’s 1955 bestselling novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, captures the image perfectly. Most of these grey flannel suited men worked for large corporations. In 1956, William H. Whyte published The Organization Man, in which he warned that corporations, with their emphasis on bureaucracy and conformity, were producing workers incapable of independent thought and two eager to please authority. The bold entrepreneurial spirit, said Whyte, had given

Salinger, published in 1951, was a heavily controversial novel. However, its success proved the American public felt strong resonance with the subject matter, revealing a sizzling discontentment underneath the picture-perfect surface. Told from the voice of a sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, around whom the story revolves and who has just learned he is being expelled from his prep school (after already failing out of another.) In Holden’s eyes, the school-for that matter, society, in general-is “full of phonies.” Holden curses frequently and the book even dared at the time to deal with the topic of adolescent sexuality. It sparked immense anger from parents and librarians. However, the main underlying issue of its controversy, was the character himself, Holden, a young man who rejects society’s pressures to conform to its constricting standards of normalcy and

Teens of the Silent generation would be subject to American society’s increasing skepticism of the government, the hippie movement, and the sexual revolution. By the end of the 1960s, mass media had started targeting this generation as a market. Later, gender roles would shift even more and the color-coated clean film that had covered the 1950s via mass media would rip into a revolution. Betty Friedman’s The Feminine Mystique would be published in 1963, detailing the suburban housewife’s depression and regret. The more radical rejection of 1950s conformity came from a group of writers known as the Beats. Based in New York City’s Greenwich Village, these writers expressed their alienation from mainstream society. They dismissed the culture of corporate conformity as “square.” They celebrated all things “hip.” Though their writing was often panned, being critiqued as self-indulgent, other works, such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl spurred immense controversy, even leading to charges of obscenity against the publisher. Yet, the judge ultimately ruled that the poem wasn’t obscene, but had “redeeming social importance.” Such examples were an attempt to reveal the true image of society as opposed to mass media’s own image of not only what American life was, but what the “American dream” was. The roles of women and men continued to