I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hotshot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Pencey Prep is this school that's in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him.
He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. He's going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every week end. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. They're nice and all-I'm not saying that-but they're also touchy as hell. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them." "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists.