New York City itself was a lighter, safer, less hostile place for Holden than it has been for some subsequent generations. Central Park was a gathering place for families. However, there is an undercurrent of fear, danger, and decadence, centered in New York City, that Holden seems both repelled by and attracted to. The Catcher in the Rye appeals to us because of its universality, but it is important that it takes place mostly in Manhattan at the crossroads of the 1940s and 1950s. As Sanford Pinsker points out in The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence Under Pressure (published by Simon & Schuster), the novel is a “mixture of bright talk and brittle manners, religious quest and nervous breakdown, [which] captured not only the perennial confusions of adolescence, but also the spiritual discomforts of an entire age.”
