Encapsulating the 1950s Teenager in The Catcher in the Rye Critically acclaimed director Tim Burton says, “A person's madness is the reality of another person". Our lives are governed by the social hierarchy with the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom. For a rich person who has lived a comfortable life, their idea of ​​madness would be living on the streets, begging for food and money to survive. Yet this idea of ​​madness is actually people's reality, even if in the 1950s, thanks to the period of prosperity, people's lives were a little better than living on the streets. In entertainment, however, the family's life was portrayed as perfect. They had enough money to live a good life, they never fought with each other, nor did they ever suffer from anything harmful. These images were so compelling that people aspired to live this kind of life by trying to become someone else in an attempt to ignore the negative aspects of life. Holden, criticizes these false images of perfection because there is no sense of reality to support them. When he is expelled from Pencey Prep, he decides to spend three days in New York before returning home. During this time period, one can see how Holden Caulfield, anti-hero of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, encapsulates the typical 1950s teenager who criticizes the way people lived their lives in his time. they viewed adolescents as different and rebellious because of the differences as an expression of emotions that separated them from their parents' generation. The older generation noted that "in contrast to more respectable emotional repression, white adolescents increasingly valued the expression of passion and desire" (16). The expression of steps...... middle of paper ...... mon in the 1950s were Holden's most important behaviors that captured and held the reader's attention. Historically, he would have been just another teenager living with a family whose parents cared more about their social status, drank and smoked. In conclusion, by analyzing Holden, it is possible to analyze an entire era of history. Works Cited Hale, Grace Elizabeth. A nation of outsiders: How the white middle class fell in love with rebellion in postwar America. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Question School. Network. April 7, 2014. Rollin, Lucy. Twentieth-century teen culture for decades: A reference guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Question School. Network. April 6, 2014. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye, Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Print.Young, William H. and Nancy K. Young. The 1950s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Question School. Network. April 6. 2014.