Who wrote the novel 'The Catcher in the Rye'?

J. D. Salinger wrote the novel The Catcher in the Rye.

Published by Little, Brown and Company on July 16, 1951, the book follows Holden Caulfield, a troubled sixteen-year-old who leaves his boarding school and wanders through New York City. Holden’s distinctive narration captures his alienation, grief, anxiety, and distrust of what he calls “phony” adult behavior.

The novel grew out of Salinger’s earlier short fiction about the Glass family and became his best-known work. Its title refers to Holden’s imagined role of catching children before they fall from a field of rye—a symbolic fantasy about protecting innocence. The image is based on his mishearing or reinterpreting a line from Robert Burns’s poem “Comin’ Through the Rye.”

The book is often confused with an autobiography, but Holden is a fictional character, not Salinger himself. The novel has also frequently faced censorship challenges because of its language, sexual references, and themes of rebellion, though it remains a major work of American coming-of-age literature.