I have to confess: I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was thirteen and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It was O.K., but no Studs Lonigan. All I really got from it was Holden’s brother’s tip about Ring Lardner and for that, if nothing else, Salinger’s book remains important to me. In his short story, “The Young Immigrunts,” Lardner wrote what is probably the best exchange of dialogue in all American literature (original spelling and punctuation have been preserved):
Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.
This was literature that I lived every day. Even in English, it sounded just like home.
Louis Jordan delivers the punchline in his own way:
