D." Salinger (pronounced /ˈsælɪndʒər/; born on January 1, 1919) is an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. He has not published an original work since 1965 and has not been interviewed since 1980.
He made headlines across the globe in June 2009 after entering a lawsuit against a writer whom Salinger has sued for copyright infringements due to his use of one of Salingers' "Catcher in the Rye" characters. A recent hearing has stated that Salinger will only press charges until the press starts to invade his privacy to get coverage of the situation.
Raised in the Bronx, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II.
In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success.
His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read, selling around 250,000 copies a year.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny: Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).
His last published work, a novella entitled "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Afterwards, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924" in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity, the release was indefinitely delayed.
In 2009 he sued the publishers of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye , a parody novel that uses the same protagonist in old age.
Early life
Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York, on New Year's Day, 1919.
His mother, Marie Jillich, was half-Scottish and half-Irish. His father, Sol Salinger, was a Jew of Polish origin who sold kosher cheese. Salinger did not find out that his mother was not Jewish until just after his bar mitzvah. He had one sibling: his sister Doris (1911-2001).
The young Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, then moved to the private McBurney School for ninth and tenth grades.
10. J. D. Salinger, Franny And Zooey
J.D. Salinger
He acted in several plays and "showed an innate talent for drama," though his father was opposed to the idea of J.D. becoming an actor. He was happy to get away from his over-protective mother by entering the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Though he had written for the school newspaper at McBurney, at Valley Forge Salinger began writing stories "under the covers , with the aid of a flashlight." He started his freshman year at New York University in 1936, and considered studying special education, but dropped out the following spring.
That fall, his father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business and he was sent to work at a company in Vienna, Austria.
He left Austria only a month or so before it was annexed by Nazi Germany, on March 12, 1938. In 1939, Salinger attended a Columbia University evening writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine.
According to Burnett, Salinger did not distinguish himself until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point "he suddenly came to life" and completed three stories. Burnett told Salinger that his stories were skillful and accomplished, and accepted "The Young Folks", a vignette about several aimless youths, for publication in Story. Salinger's debut short story was published in the magazine's March-April 1940 issue. Despite finding the debutante self-absorbed (he confided to a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in love with little Oona"), he called her often and wrote her long letters. Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married. In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly as a performer.
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker.
He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and he later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." Both of his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories, such as "For Esmé with Love and Squalor," which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. He continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, and in 1945 rejected a group of 15 poems.
Post-war years
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "de-Nazification" duty in Germany. He met a woman named Sylvia, and they married in 1945. He brought her to the United States, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany. In 1972, Salinger's daughter Margaret was with him when he received a letter from Sylvia.
He looked at the envelope, and without reading it, tore it apart. It was the first time he had heard from her since the breakup, but as Margaret put it, "when he was finished with a person, he was through with them."
In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint. Titled The Young Folks, the collection was to consist of twenty stories — ten, like the title story and "Slight Rebellion off Madison," were already in print; ten were previously unpublished. Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance on its sale, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book. Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.
By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddhism, to the point that he "gave reading lists on the subject to his dates" and arranged a meeting with Buddhist scholar D.
In 1948, he submitted a short story titled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" to The New Yorker. The magazine was so impressed with "the singular quality of the story" that its editors accepted it for publication immediately, and signed Salinger to a contract that allowed them right of first refusal on any future stories. The critical acclaim accorded "Bananafish", coupled with problems Salinger had with stories being altered by the "slicks", led him to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker. "Bananafish" was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a fictional family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. Salinger eventually published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the troubled eldest child.
In the early 1940s, Salinger had confided in a letter to Whit Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories in order to achieve financial security. According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was disappointed when "rumblings from Hollywood" over his 1943 short story "The Varioni Brothers" came to nothing.
JD Salinger Rap
Catching Salinger: Pencey Prep
The book is more notable for the iconic persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden. He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity. In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining that "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book.… t was a great relief telling people about it."
Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging from The New York Times's hailing of Catcher as "an unusually brilliant first novel" to denigrations of the book's monotonous language and the "immorality and perversion" of Holden, who uses religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution. The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, The Catcher in the Rye had been reprinted eight times. It spent thirty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.
The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late 1950s, according to Ian Hamilton, it had "become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed." Newspapers began publishing articles about the "Catcher Cult", and the novel was banned in several countries – as well as some U.S.
schools – because of its subject matter and what Catholic World reviewer Riley Hughes called an "excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language". One irate parent counted 237 appearances of the word "goddam" in the novel, along with 58 "bastard"s, 31 "Chrissake"s, and 6 "fuck"s.
In the 1970s, several U.S. Salinger stated in the 1970s that "Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden." The author has repeatedly refused, though, and in 1999, Joyce Maynard definitively concluded: "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J.
Salinger responded: "A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E.
I don't think it's right." In letters written in the 1940s, Salinger had expressed his admiration of three living, or recently-deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Though she committed herself to Kriya yoga, she remembered that Salinger would chronically leave Cornish to work on a story "for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone or destroyed and some new 'ism' we had to follow." Claire believed "it was to cover the fact that Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn't face the quality of, or couldn't face publishing, what he had created."
After abandoning Kriya yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), even meeting its founder L.
In an article that profiled his "life of recluse", the magazine reported that the Glass family series "is nowhere near completion…Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy". However, Salinger has published only one other story since: "Hapworth 16, 1924," an epistolary novella in the form of a long letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass from summer camp. It took up most of the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker.
The New York Times had asked Maynard to write an article for them which, when published as "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life" on April 23, 1972, made her a celebrity. Maynard later writes in her own memoir how she came to find out that Salinger had begun relationships with young women by exchanging letters.
I Met The Walrus;
An Unpublished Manuscript For J.D. Salinger
According to Maynard, by 1972 he had completed two new novels. In a rare 1974 interview with The New York Times, he explained: "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.… I like to write. Excerpts from his letters were also widely disseminated, most notably a bitter remark written in response to Oona O'Neill's marriage to Charlie Chaplin:
I can see them at home evenings.
Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom.
Salinger was romantically involved with television actress Elaine Joyce for several years in the 1980s. The relationship ended when he met Colleen O'Neill (b. Amazon anticipated that Orchises would publish the story in January 2009, however as of May 2009 it is no longer listed.
In June 2009 Salinger consulted lawyers about the upcoming publication of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye by a young Swedish-American writer who styles himself J.
C", musing on having escaped his nursing home.
Salinger, now 90 and still living in New Hampshire, has refused to comment. But "wind up" could have other connotations: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the title of a 1997 novel by the popular Japanese writer Haruki Murakami which features a Holden Caulfield-esque protagonist.
Recent publicity
In 1999, twenty-five years after the end of their relationship, Joyce Maynard put up for auction a series of letters Salinger had written to her.
Among other indiscretions, the book described how Maynard's mother had consulted with her on how to appeal to the aging author (dressing like a child), and described Maynard's relationship with him at length. To my father, all Spanish speakers are Puerto Rican washerwomen, or the toothless, grinning gypsy types in a Marx Brothers movie."
Margaret also offered many insights into other Salinger myths, including her father's supposed long-time interest in macrobiotics and involvement with "alternative medicine" and Eastern philosophies.
I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes."
Literary style and themes
In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote: "I almost always write about very young people", a statement which has been referred to as his credo. Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published short story, "The Young Folks", to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. Such style elements also " him the illusion of having, as it were, delivered his characters' destinies into their own keeping." Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large", the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults, and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.
Contemporary critics discuss a clear progression over the course of Salinger's published work, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews received by each of his three post-Catcher story collections. Ian Hamilton adheres to this view, arguing that while Salinger's early stories for the "slicks" boasted "tight, energetic" dialogue, they had also been formulaic and sentimental.
Salinger really opened my eyes as to how you can weave fiction out of a set of events that seem almost unconnected, or very lightly connected.… stick in my mind as really having moved me a step up, as it were, toward knowing how to handle my own material." The critic Louis Menand has observed that the early stories of Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth were affected by "Salinger's voice and comic timing."
National Book Award finalist Richard Yates told The New York Times in 1977 that reading Salinger's stories for the first time was a landmark experience, and that "nothing quite like it has happened to me since." Yates describes Salinger as "a man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled, and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word." Gordon Lish's O. Your voice." Authors such as Stephen Chbosky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Carl Hiaasen, Susan Minot, Haruki Murakami, Gwendoline Riley, Tom Robbins, Louis Sachar, and Joel Stein have cited Salinger as an influence.
List of works
Books
Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Nine Stories (1953)
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948)
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948)
"Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (1948)
"The Laughing Man" (1949)
"Down at the Dinghy" (1949)
"For Esmé with Love and Squalor" (1950)
"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" (1951)
"De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" (1952)
"Teddy" (1953)
Franny and Zooey (1961)
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
"Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters" (1955)
Published and anthologized stories
"Go See Eddie" (1940, republished in Fiction: Form & Experience, ed.
Pack My Bag V. Catcher In The Rye
J D Salinger Is Black Over The Sea
Whit Burnett, 1949)
"A Boy in France" (1945, republished in Post Stories 1942-45, ed. Martha Foley, 1949)
"Slight Rebellion off Madison" (1946, republished in Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, ed.