Holden Caulfield Conservatism

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America won; humanity lost. It was the rising curtain that spelled the end of a Eurocentric world, writing a new chapter in human destruction. World War II-the beginning of a new era. America’s increased prosperity was not enough to maintain the foundation upon which it built itself; the war left a wound too great to be mended, a wound that let itself bleed through the pages of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The novel’s publication struck a chord with the deeply wounded post-war American public. Conformity pervaded 1950s American society, and with the political scene moving towards conservatism, this book was one of the few that challenged America’s mainstream values; it delivered a shock factor with its main character, Holden Caulfield,

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