In this excerpt, Matchie presents The House on Mango Street as a contemporary parallel to the classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, describing the three young protagonists as similarly innocent and vulnerable, and noting that each character develops his or her own identity in reaction to a specific environment.

In 1963 in a collection of articles entitled Salinger, Edgar Branch has a piece in which he explores the "literary continuity" between Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger's Catcher In the Rye. Branch claims that, though these two books represent different times in American history, the characters, the narrative patterns and styles, and the language are strikingly similar, so that what Salinger picks up, according to Branch, is an archetypal continuity which is cultural as well as literary. I would like to suggest a third link in this chain...