y 1961, Catcher had sold 1,500,000 copies; by 1965, 5,000,000; last year the total of its sales stood

at more than 9,000,000. The Catcher in the Rye arrived to stay and is older now than most of its audience when they read it for the first time. That quarter century is time enough to allow us to generalize not only about the book's reception in 1951 but about the consensus of critical opinion that developed after-wards. We are concerned, in brief, with how Catcher became a classic: this is a case study of capitalist criticism. And in it, we shall have in mind the distinction Raymond Williams makes in Culture and Society between the lives books lead in the minds of readers and the lives their readers (and writers) live in particular historical times.

To return to July 16, 1951: on that Monday, the front page of the Times carried eleven news stories. The largest headline, with the text beneath breaking into two parts, concerned the war in Korea, then a year old: one part told that peace talks between United Nations negotiators and Communists had resumed in Kaesong (they would, of course, be unsuccessful), and the other reported with extensive quotation a speech Secretary of State Dean Acheson made in New York to book and magazine publishers on the meaning of the Korean conflict; the State Department had released the speech "at the request of a number of those" who were present to hear it. An account of the fighting itself with maps and communiqus from the field and a list of casualties appeared on page two. The front-page news was not, in other words, of the combat and its immediate consequences but of verbal maneuvering in the conflict between Communism and the Western world and of the ideological interpretation our leading spokesman in foreign affairs wished to give to events in Korea.

Apart from stories on a flood in Kansas City, the weather in New York (hot, dry, and hard on the water supply), and a request for funding for new schools in the City, all the other articles on the front page bore on the struggle between East and West, of which events in Korea were simply for the moment the most dramatic and costly example: in Teheran, 10,000 "Iranian Reds" rioted to protest the arrival of Averill Harriman, who had come as Truman's special assistant to talk with the Shah's government about the Iranian- British oil dispute; Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, left for a week in Europe, which would include discussion in Spain about possibilities of "joint military cooperation"; the United States asked for

the recall from Washington of two Hungarian diplomats in retaliation for the expulsion of two American officials from Budapest; a Republican congressman protested that his party's opposition to Truman's proposal for continued price, wage, and credit controls was not "sabotaging" those controls but aimed at stopping "socialistic power grabs" on the part of the A dministration.