Holden Caulfield is the 17-year-old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He is universally recognized for his resistance to growing older and desire to protect childhood innocence. Since the book's 1951 publication, Holden has become an icon for teenage rebellion and angst, and now stands among the most important characters of 20th-century American literature. The name Holden Caulfield, as shown below, was used in an unpublished short story written in 1942 and first appeared in print in 1945.

Although it is thought by some that J.D. Salinger got the name for Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye when he saw a marquee for Dear Ruth (1947), starring William Holden and Joan Caulfield, Salinger's first Holden Caulfield story, "I'm Crazy," appeared in Collier's on December 22, 1945, a year and a half before this movie came out.

One of Holden's most striking and quintessential qualities is his powerful revulsion for "phony" qualities, a catch all term for all the hypocrisy that infuriates Holden. It is this cynicism that consequently causes him to distance himself from other people. Despite Holden's strong disdain for phony qualities, he exhibits some of the qualities that he abhors, thereby making him a somewhat tragic character. Holden is very much a character of contradiction; At six feet, two-and-a-half inches, he is tall for his age and already has some gray hair, though he himself admits that he acts more like a 13-year-old than an adult. He continually fails classes and calls himself "dumb", yet he shows intelligence through his reasonably articulate narration.