Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Paderborn, language: English, abstract: American Literature thematizing youth, adolescence and initiation draws on a long tradition reaching back to the 18th century, including writers like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James and William Faulkner. After the Second World War, the American novel of adolescence flourished again in a period that also gave birth to the genre's arguably most prominent representative: When J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye...