The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
(seventeen-year-old escapes stifling upbringing, on the run in New York at Christmas)
Families (relationships between the generations)
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Roddy Doyle, The Commitments
John Updike, The Centaur
John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle
François Mauriac, The Nest of Vipers
Growing Up (young adults coming to terms with their own needs and desires - and with the world at large)
William Golding, The Pyramid
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (adolescent orphan goes to live with deranged puppeteer-uncle)
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (young Australian, 1910s, preys on follies of European bourgeoisie)
Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse
Philip Roth, Portnoy"s Complaint
Antonia White, Frost in May
New York (the city as a vast, all-engulfing landscape)
Jerome Weidman, Fourth Street East
Martin Amis, Money
James Baldwin, Another Country
USA (seen - by adults as well as the young - as a kind of theme-park on the borderland between reality and fantasy)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1860s Mississippi: boy"s adolescence on river and in riverside communities)
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Patricia Highsmith, The People Who Knock on the Door
John Irving, The Cider House Rules
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Garrison Keiller, Lake Wobegon Days
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (Sammy claws his way to the top; scum always floats)