After half a century, teenagers keep hanging out with Holden

Crumby! While the ultimate American exploration of teen angst has turned 50 -- J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" -- the book is still attracting attention and notoriety, even among today's youths.

First published on July 16, 1951, the book, with its '50s slang and its 16-year-old protagonist, has sold 60 million copies around the world. Holden Caulfield's prep-school misery and rage at the world's "phonies" still resonates.

"He has the same problems teenagers still have," says Robinson Gold, 16, of Washington, D.C. "Who are your friends, whom should you trust, problems with school." Gold has read the book three times. "It's my favorite."

You won't be seeing TV crews at the 82-year-old author's New Hampshire home. Jerome David Salinger continues to define the word "reclusive." However:

• The American Library Association says "The Catcher in the Rye" ranks No. 10 on the list of the most challenged 100 books from 1990 to 1999. (The No. 1 title is Alvin Schwartz's series, "Scary Stories.")

• Columnist George Will denounced it recently as encouraging the concept of "the American as whiner."

• On the USA Today Best-Selling Books list, it is No. 43. Always a summer best seller, it was the No. 1 best-selling classic on last year's annual list.

• Amazon.com on Monday sold the book for its original 1951 price of $3.

"The voice is always fresh," says John Wenke, a professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland and the author of the 1991 book "J.D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction." "Everyone goes through the angst and the anger, but the neat thing is, it's very funny."

"Catcher" was not published as a young adult novel, but as a novel for adults. And to this day, the vulgar language, Holden's dislike for authority and a scene with a prostitute alarm parents, says Judith Krug, director of the office for intellectual freedom of the American Library Association.

Margaret Salinger's memoir of life with her father, "Dream Catcher," will be released in paperback this October. Estranged from J.D., she describes him as a narcissist. She was sent to boarding school at 12. "If you want him to be your catcher in reality," she says, "you are barking up the wrong tree."