To remember J. D. Salinger is, of course, to remember The Catcher in the Rye—though not, perhaps, how some critics didn't like it in 1951. Catholic World noted its "formidably excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language," and there seemed to be some question as to whether an alienated, hard-drinking, chain-smoking flunkie like Holden Caulfield was going to prove a good influence on the young. Other critics did say it made them "chuckle and ... even laugh aloud," and many immediately compared Holden to Huck Finn.

Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

By Morris Dickstein

(W.W. Norton, 598 pp., $29.95)

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

By Linda Gordon

(W.W. Norton, 536 pp., $35)

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty In U.S. Literature, 1840-1945

By Gavin Jones

(Princeton University Press, 248 pp., $38.50)

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a story of 1926, at the height of the economic boom and his own creative powers. “They are different from you and me.” Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” he explained, which makes them cynical and haughty. “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” The passage is best known not for its psychological insight, but for Ernest Hemingway’s withering rejoinder. Yes, the rich are different, he conceded: “They have more money.” As with so many of their recorded exchanges, Hemingway is supposed to have come out on top. We are meant to feel that Fitzgerald, in his usual romantic way, believed that the rich really were better, and that he needed Hemingway’s bracing realism to bring him back to earth.

For years, I have been reading Michael Greenberg's remarkable column in the Times Literary Supplement and wondering what the English make of it. The New York Jewish quality of Greenberg's take on the writer's life, under the rubric "Freelance," is emphasized by the way he takes turns writing the column with an English poet, Hugo Williams, who is a writer of a wholly different species. Williams is deeply ensconced in the world of poetry-writing programs, residencies, and workshops--the whole infrastructure of institutionalized creativity, which seems no less formidable in the United Kingdom than in the United States. When Williams is not writing about giving a reading or teaching a class, he is often discussing his wife's chateau in France, or his father, a British theater and film star from the 1950s.

“For two thousand years,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, “the main energies of Jewish communities have gone into the mass production of intellectuals.” For Rosenberg, the art critic who belonged to the receding constellation of writers known as the New York Intellectuals, such a claim was something between a boast and a self-justification. The New York Intellectuals were mainly second-generation Americans, whose self-sacrificing immigrant parents won them the opportunities America offered to newcomers, including Jews. But their inheritances did not include, in most cases, a traditional Jewish education. Instead of learning the Mishnah and Talmud, like their cousins back in Eastern Europe, they drilled themselves in Marx and Henry James.