"A Defunct Canon"

"It's not surprising that these authors found their way to so many teenage readers. Many, after all, were bestsellers. Perhaps even more important, a good number were key figures in the postwar U.S. counterculture. Certain titles, like Heller's Catch-22, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, were practically required reading for participants in the antiwar movement and the generational upheaval of which it was a part. Even Hesse's novels, published in the early twentieth century, came to be, according to critic Adam Kirsch, 'literary gateway drugs' and hippie talismans for young people, with Timothy Leary recommending them as good preparation for trying LSD. Even after the counterculture dissipated, these authors remained ubiquitous, as baby boomers passed them on to the next generation of readers. Telling adolescents not to trust grownups is apparently an evergreen rhetorical move, even when it takes the form of a book recommendation by a parent or teacher."

Timothy Aubry at The Point discusses "the gateway books" for late-twenieth-century high-school students.