July 16

In literary history

• 1951J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye, then retreated behind a silence he maintained for the rest of his life. The novel became the most challenged book in American schools for two decades, which Holden Caulfield would have found entirely predictable.

Writers born on July 16

• Reinaldo Arenas (1943)

The Daily Canon for July 16

The Prelude by William Wordsworth (1850).