Salinger

One of the great things about working for a magazine with an 85-year history is our vast and fascinating archives. I haven't read much J. D. Salinger (just The Catcher in the Rye in high school, like everybody else), but I knew Commonweal must have published lots of interesting articles about him over the years. I spent this afternoon digging up and posting two of the best, and if you're a fan of Salinger, midcentury fiction writing, or snappy literary criticism, I encourage you to check them out. Just go here and follow the links to find out what critics had to say about Salinger in 1957, and what occasioned this fabulous sentence in 1963: "And then there is Mary McCarthy, thumbing her nose in a kind of bitchy pique."