Time to move on from adolescence

I guess you really know when adolescence is over when J.D. Salinger dies.

The reclusive author, 91, passed away Wednesday after living in seclusion in New Hampshire for much of the last 55 years.

I read "Catcher in the Rye,'' his classic novel published in 1951 of a disaffected 16-year-old who had just been kicked out of prep school, as a 16-year-old prep-school student in the mid-'60s.

I immediately identified with the brooding tone, the casual swearing, the irreverence toward authority.

One of the things that surprised me in the obits I read today was that today's adolescents, and those from the last few decades, feel the same sense of identification with main character Holden Caulfield that I and my contemporaries did. The book has sold 65 million copies overall and is still jumping out of bookstores at the rate of 250,000 a year.

Guess I just assumed that people who spend their lives twittering and texting and playing video games would have other symbols of angst to identify with, but apparently things have changed less than I imagined. It is still one of the most widely taught books in high schools today, my Google references tell me.

I don't know if that is necessarily a good thing, but I do know that it's too bad for the rest of us he largely withdrew from writing and the world not long after his early successes.

It would have been good to know what he made of becoming a man and then getting old.