Recognizing a novelist’s, filmmaker’s, or visual artist’s influence on society is perfectly acceptable as long as those Cultural Influence Professionals nudge folks in the liberal-left direction, and one limits comments to description alone. If, however, you criticize or create work that pushes back against this influence be prepared to suffer slings and arrows. Times Arts Correspondent Ben Hoyle noted J.D. Salinger’s influence on American youth. Catcher in the Rye, Hoyle noted, had spread its influence into many undernourished corners of cultural life. Along with Elvis Presley’s music and James Dean’s swaggering Rebel Without a Cause persona, it was Salinger’s Caulfield who best dramatised the emergence of a defiant youth identity in 1950s America. It helped to create demand among young people for their own cultural products, a demand that would fuel the youth cultural revolutions that convulsed the West, and later the whole world. Salinger helped to invent the notion of teenage angst, and is a father figure to everything from punk music to Donnie Darko, and Bart Simpson to The Graduate. In music, Guns N’ Roses and Green Day are two of the modern bands who have worn its influence most explicitly. In film, the director Wes Anderson often
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