Clipped from the Washington Post a while back:

"The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just
about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right
up there with the book that was published the
following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and
the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved
books in American literature and, by any reasonable
critical standard, two of the worst.