J.D. Salinger | Biography, Books and Facts [Cite This] J.D. Salinger Famous not only for his writing but also for his private nature, J.D. Salinger is the author of the famous 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. The autobiographic nature of the novel became the voice of a whole generation of young men wedged in frustration over the conventions of society. An immediate best-seller, the success of The Catcher in the Rye, however, did not persuade Salinger to publish another novel. Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on January 1, 1919. He was the youngest son of a rabbi, Sol Salinger and Miriam. Not proving to be a good student, Salinger was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania after failing at the McBurney School in New York. Salinger later studied at Ursinus College and New York University. Salinger published a story for the first time at the age of 21 when he met and befriended Whit Burnett who was the founder and editor of the Story Magazine at Columbia University. Burnett encouraged Salinger’s writing talent and published his stories in his magazine.

Soon Salinger’s work started making its way to more publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. Just when Salinger’s writing career had started taking off, he was interrupted by the break of World War II and had to serve in the Army (1942-1944). It was during this time that Salinger started working on his masterpiece, giving birth to the legendry character of Holden Caulfield. The trauma from the war resulted in a nervous breakdown after which Salinger was hospitalized. While under treatment, Salinger met his first wife Sylvia, probably a German Nazi. The two stayed in marriage for a short period of 8 months only. In 1955, Salinger married again, Claire Douglas, daughter, of a noted art critic. Maintaining the marriage for a little more than 10 years, the couple had two children. Six years after his divorce, a new relationship bloomed when he noticed the name of Joyce Maynard, whose story in New York Times Magazine impressed Salinger after which he started a series of intense correspondence with her. Joyce soon moved in with Salinger and was lashed out after 10 months.

In 1998 Joyce wrote about her experience with Salinger, describing him to be an obsessive lover. Maynard was not the end of Salinger’s love life. He was romantically involved with actress Ellen Joyce for some time after which he married Colleen O’Neill, a young nurse who remained his wife until his death on January 27, 2010. Salinger was showered with praise when his novel, The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. Despite also receiving some very harsh criticism on grounds of promoting immoral views, the book, ironically became the most taught book of the 20th century with its inclusion in the curriculum of high school literature. A best seller for life, the book has sold over 120 million copies all over the world. According to John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, the reason for his crime was in the pages of The Catcher in the Rye which was found in Chapman’s possession at the time of his arrest. Although Salinger continued to write till the end of his days, The Catcher in the Rye remains his only published novel. He led a private life of immense secrecy and speculation.

Some sources believe there may be at least 10 completed novels hidden in Salinger’s house. Buy Books by J.D. Salinger J. D. Salinger - The New York Times The New York Times Supported by J. D. Salinger News about J. D. Salinger, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More J.D. Salinger 1919 — 2010 J. D. Salinger, the obsessively private author who captured the hearts of several generations with his pitch-perfect knowledge of adolescence and his ear for the vernacular, died on Jan. 28, 2010. “The Catcher in the Rye” is his best-known work. Mr. Salinger, who was born on Jan. 1, 1919 in Manhattan, lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish. N.H. for more than half a century. He was not photographed for decades. Mr. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” caused a sensation when it was published.

With its very first sentence, the book, which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published in 1953, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone. In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. “Franny and Zooey,” a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr.

Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker . The story, which came out in book form in 1997, continued, and perhaps even completed, the saga of the strangely dysfunctional Glass family. In the ’70s Mr. Salinger stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography. Mr. Salinger sued repeatedly over the years to protect his privacy and the sanctity of his work. In the last case, a federal district judge in Manhattan on July 1, 2009, indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a book by a Swedish author containing a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfied, the querulous, precocious protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In a copyright infringement lawsuit, Mr.

Salinger’s lawyers called the new novel, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” “a rip-off pure and simple.” The book was written by Fredrick Colting, a 33-year-old humor writer who uses the pseudonym J. D. California. Mr. Colting said he would appeal the ruling. Mr. Salinger’s carefully guarded privacy was breached in 1999 by the auction of letters that Mr. Salinger wrote in the early 1970s to the writer Joyce Maynard, with whom Mr. Salinger had a nine-month romance. It began when she was an 18-year-old Yale University freshman and Mr. Salinger was a celebrated 53-year-old author who had retreated from public life to an isolated cottage in New Hampshire. The letters were bought by the California software entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Norton, who returned them to Mr. Salinger. One year later, in 2000, Mr. Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, came out with a memoir, “Dream Catcher,” that revealed previously unknown and deeply intimate aspects of her father’s life. Ms.

Salinger said her father was pathologically self-centered, and that nothing could interrupt his work, which he likened to a quest for enlightenment. Ms. Salinger said her father was also abusive to his second wife and her mother, Claire Douglas, keeping her a virtual prisoner in his house in Cornish, N.H., refusing to allow her to see friends and family. Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science, according to the daughter. He also drank urine, and sat in a Reichian orgone box, Ms. Salinger wrote. He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls. Background Mr. Salinger was born Jerome David Salinger, the son of Miriam and Sol Salinger, who became a prosperous food merchant in New York. He grew up on the Upper West Side and Park Avenue and attended the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. According to Ms. Salinger, her father always thought his parents were Jewish but when he was a teenager he discovered that they hid from him that his mother was Irish Catholic. Still, Mr.

Salinger experienced anti-Semitism, from which he developed his aversion, expressed by his characters, for the Ivy League, for “phonies.” During World War II he was a counterintelligence agent assigned to the Twelfth Regiment of the Fourth Division, interrogating POW’s. He served in the most brutal campaigns of the European theater, including D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 in Germany he was hospitalized for '‘battle fatigue.’' In her memoir, Ms. Salinger wrote that her father arrested a young Nazi Party functionary, Sylvia, then married her. The marriage was brief, and forever after he referred to her as Saliva. Ms. Salinger’s parents met in 1950 when the English-born Ms. Douglas was about 16 and Mr. Salinger about 31. At the time Ms. Douglas and Mr. Salinger met, he abstained from sex, her mother told Ms. Salinger, because he was studying with an Indian mystic who taught that sex interfered with enlightenment. Just months before her high school graduation, Ms. Douglas married Mr. Salinger and moved with him to Cornish. Ms.

Douglas told her daughter that he demanded elaborate meals and that the sheets had to be laundered twice weekly, though there was no heat or hot water. The couple had two children, Margaret, born in 1955 and Matthew, who was born five years later and is an actor and producer in California. They divorced in 1966. Mr. Salinger then married his third wife, Colleen, a nurse, some 50 years younger than he, according to Ms. Salinger. At one point, the couple tried to have a child. Mr. Salinger was a playful father who seemed easier in the magic world of childhood, his daughter said. Her imaginary friends were real to him, too, she said, as were the characters in his books. '‘The world of fiction and reality were very blurred,’' she wrote in her memoir. J.D. Salinger (Author of The Catcher in the Rye) Literature & Fiction , Short Stories Influences edit data Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature.

His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980. Raised in Manhattan, 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, espe Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980. Raised in Manhattan, 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 and controversial, 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.

Afterward, 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. He made headlines around the globe in June 2009, after filing a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of Salinger's characters from The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. Franny and Zooey Essay - Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger - eNotes.com Franny and Zooey Essay - Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger link Link Franny and Zooey J. D.

Salinger The following entry presents criticism of Salinger's novella Franny and Zooey. See also J. D. Salinger Chronology, J. D. Salinger Literary Criticism. (Introdution), and Volumes 1, 3. Considered one of Salinger's most popular works, Franny and Zooey was initially published in the New Yorker as two separate stories entitled "Franny" (1955) and "Zooey" (1957). The novella is perceived to exemplify the themes and narrative techniques that characterize Salinger's writing as a whole: his penchant for sensitive, troubled young people; his disapproval of the shallowness and artificiality of modern American culture; his interest in Eastern mysticism; and his affinity for the nuances of language and dialogue. Though critical reaction to the novella has been varied, most scholars continue to acknowledge the artistic value of Franny and Zooey, Salinger's influence on the style and substance of other writers, and above all, his distinctive place in modern American literature, particularly among young readers.

Plot and Major Characters The reissuing of Franny and Zooey as a novella made obvious what had already been clear to most of Salinger's readers, that "Zooey" was the conclusion or solution to "Franny," the story of a young woman's emotional and spiritual breakdown. Franny, the youngest of the Glass siblings, is an attractive college student who meets her Ivy League boyfriend, Lane Coutell, for the weekend of the Yale football game. During lunch at a fashionable restaurant, Franny feels increasingly dismayed by Lane's pretentiousness and self-absorption. Stating that she is sick of pedants and egotistical people, Franny tries to explain her enthusiasm for The Way of the Pilgrim, the story of a Russian peasant who learned how to pray the "Jesus prayer" without ceasing, until it became one with his heartbeat. Unable to make him understand or to fight her overwhelming feelings of distaste, Franny excuses herself from the table and faints in the bar. When she regains consciousness, she finds Lane anxious to get her to the rooming-house, where he hopes to join her later for a clandestine rendezvous.

Alone, as Lane calls for a cab, Franny stares at the ceiling, soundlessly repeating the Jesus prayer. The latter part of the novella, originally published as the short story "Zooey," begins the morning following Franny's collapse. She is home in New York City, where her worried mother Bessie and her older brother Zooey, a celebrated television actor, attend to her. Later, a dialogue occurs between Zooey and Franny, in which Zooey alternately soothes and attacks Franny for her self-centeredness and inability to understand the true meaning of the Jesus prayer. Franny remains mired in her depression and asks to speak with Seymour, the oldest Glass sibling whose suicide left the family without its spiritual leader. Zooey enters Seymour's old room where he calls Franny on the telephone, pretending unsuccessfully to be their older brother Buddy. Zooey explains to her that she must disregard the phonies of the world and stick to her own high standards; she must believe, as Seymour had once told them when they starred regularly on a famous radio quiz show featuring child prodigies, that they are performing for the Fat Lady.

Zooey suddenly realizes that the Fat Lady, Seymour's metaphor for the ugly and vulgar person in the audience, is Jesus Christ. Consoled, Franny falls peacefully asleep. Major Themes The widespread popularity of Salinger's work has generated much critical discussion regarding the various themes of Franny and Zooey. Many commentators have examined the work from a sociological perspective, contending that Franny and Zooey's struggle against a conformist and materialistic society is the predominant theme of the novella. Critics have explored also the religious aspects of Franny and Zooey, focusing on Franny's agonized search for God, which is highlighted in her attempts to understand and become one with the Jesus prayer. They discuss the themes of revelation and redemption, particularly in Zooey's vision of the Fat Lady as Christ, an insight that enables both Franny and Zooey to achieve spiritual peace. Several critics have examined Salinger's quest for innocence and purity, maintaining that he does not explore the issue of adult sexuality. More recently, commentators have focused on the theme of the lost idyll, the efforts of Salinger's characters to end their isolation and to recapture the joy and wisdom of childhood. Critical Reception Critical commentary on Franny and Zooey varies widely.

Admirers of Salinger's work praise the vividness and verisimilitude of his characters and their colloquial speech, whereas Salinger's detractors describe Franny and Zooey as false and sentimental, as well as meaningful only to those who are fans of Salinger's earlier work. Critics have discussed the excesses of Salinger's writing; "Zooey," in particular, has been regarded as flawed because of Salinger's unwillingness to reduce Zooey's garrulousness or excise his rantings about Buddhism. On the whole, "Franny" was better received. Critics praised "Franny" for its economical prose and realistic dialogue, its sensitive portrayal of Franny, and its attack on hypocrisy and superficiality of the college environment. Despite the mixed critical reception to Salinger's novella, Franny and Zooey was an immediate bestseller, particularly with young people who shared Franny and Zooey's yearning for spiritual fulfillment and uneasiness with the materialism and superficiality of their culture. Franny and Zooey, like Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, continues to draw both critical and popular attention and remains a favorite with high school and college audiences.

More Content: Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger (hide) What was J.D. Salinger’s problem? - Salon.com Wednesday, Sep 4, 2013 11:00 PM UTC What was J.D. Salinger’s problem? A new book and film argue that the trauma of war forged the author of "The Catcher in the Rye" Topics: catcher in the rye , D-Day , Editor's Picks , Fiction , For Esme With Love and Squalor , Holden Caulfield , J.D. Salinger , salinger , World War II , Writers and Writing , Entertainment News The big revelation in “Salinger” (the film) and “Salinger” (the book), both to be released this week, is that rumors of a vault of unpublished manuscripts by the author of “The Catcher in the Rye” have turned out to be true, and, furthermore, that some of these writings continue the stories of the Glass family and Holden Caulfield.

Less exciting (a lot less exciting) is the news that at least one of the manuscripts (which will be published between 2015 and 2020) is a “manual” for the Vedanta religion, the faith that engrossed Salinger for the last 50 years of his life. Book and film also feature biographical information from new sources, most notably Jean Miller, a woman Salinger met in 1949, when she was 14, and with whom he had a quasi-romantic friendship for about five years. (Salinger dismissed her the day after the relationship was consummated.) Miller was the inspiration for the title character in his story “For Esme, with Love and Squalor.” Apart from such discoveries, the film’s director, Shane Salerno, and his co-author on the book, David Shields, offer some theories about Salinger’s life and work: specifically, the persistent question of just what was wrong with him.

As both book and film amply document, the author was a terrible father and worse husband, a man who withdrew from public life and repudiated his fame, yet was not above using that fame (via creepily seductive letters) to court teenage girls from his redoubt in Cornish, N.H. He was so merciless a perfectionist that he broke with a lifelong friend when the man, an editor, inadvertently allowed one of Salinger’s short stories to be published in a magazine with the wrong title. He once threatened his family’s former nanny with a gun when she came to his door collecting for the Red Cross drive. Salinger wasn’t a recluse; rather, as the authors stress, “what he wanted was privacy.” This is often treated as the most outlandish aspect of his personality, when really it’s the most commonsensical. One of the talking heads featured in the documentary belongs to actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who explains that people who haven’t lost the ability to walk anonymously down the street cannot appreciate what a tremendous freedom it is. “I’m tired of being collared in elevators, stopped on the street, and of interlopers on my private property,” the elderly Salinger griped in a rare interview.

“I want to be left alone, absolutely. Why can’t my life be my own?” The film features a fan who, as a young husband and father, traveled to Cornish to haunt the end of Salinger’s gravel driveway, believing that the author “felt like I did and we could talk about deep things.” Salinger, after asking if the man was “under psychiatric care,” questioned how he could have left his family for such a quest. In this respect, if few others, Salinger was decidedly less crazy than the society around him. The attention trained on him was pathological, and his withdrawal from it entirely understandable, but the more he pulled back the more hotly the popular obsession burned. Another man interviewed by the filmmakers is a photographer who hid in the bushes outside Salinger’s house and surreptitiously shot the writer as he walked his dog. Both book and film versions of “Salinger” are refreshingly frank about their subject’s many shortcomings and how they might have affected his work. The playwright John Guare, who appears in the film, notes that any writer would find cause for concern in having his novel held up by not one, not two but three separate assassins when they were asked for an explanation for their crimes.

Salinger himself said he regretted writing “The Catcher in the Rye,” mostly because of the attention it drew to him. The film also refers to Mary McCarthy’s famous takedown of the Glass family stories, “J.D. Salinger’s Closed Circuit,” in which she accused him of creating a fictional hall of mirrors in which his own self was replicated and congratulated for its brilliance, charm and integrity over and over again. (This argument is briefly and eloquently translated into images, using the film’s recurring visual motif of a besuited man typing tormentedly on a movie-theater proscenium while scenes from Salinger’s life are projected behind him. The motif is otherwise comically histrionic.) Salinger’s genius lay in his seemingly unfettered yet acutely focused voice, for the way that it released the irreverent impulse trapped within the confines of postwar America. In “Catcher,” he distilled the fiery, even Puritanical spirit of adolescence, with its tremendous energy and its vast blind spots, into the purest form imaginable; the novel is to youth what crack is to cocaine.

In the middle of “Salinger” the film, amid the Errol Morris-style reenactments and the Ken Burns-style documentary footage, the movie opens into footage of young people all over the world reading or holding up copies of “The Catcher in the Rye,” and it’s impossible not to be moved by the spectacle, even if “Catcher” wasn’t that book for you. It’s that book for so many kids — and the more power to it, for their sake. But the grown men who turned up on Salinger’s doorstep seeking conversations about “deep things” and the Mark David Chapmans (and John Hinckleys and Robert John Bardos) who saw “Catcher” as a call to strike down the world’s “phonies,” were not so much liberated into adolescent skepticism as trapped in adolescent angst. They turned to Salinger because he seemed to understand exactly how they felt. Whether they realized it or not, they were trying, and largely failing, to grow up, and they thought Salinger could help them. Unfortunately, they’d come to the wrong man because Salinger never figured it out himself. “His writing was all about innocence and the damage done to innocence by the world,” E.L.

Doctorow says in “Salinger” the film, registering as one of the more thoughtful and adult voices reflecting on the work. Too many of the other commentators are actors (all male) who express more enthusiasm than understanding. For Shields and Salerno, Salinger’s preoccupation with innocence and its desecration largely originates in his World War II experiences, which were brutal. The author participated in both the D-Day invasion and the liberation of a concentration camp. Salerno and Shields argue that “The Catcher in the Rye” “can best be understood as a disguised war novel.” Salinger’s rejection of public life can likewise be seen as a lifelong response to trauma. The film dissolves from his famously soulful author photo for “The Catcher in the Rye” to Ted Lea’s equally famous illustration of a harrowed soldier, “That 2000-Yard Stare,” with the eyes of both images superimposed on each other.

As for Salinger’s idealization and pursuit of teenage girls — a penchant that seems to me of a piece with his general fetishization of immaculate youth — Salerno and Shield see two causes: heartbreak over Oona O’Neill, an early love who married Charlie Chaplin while Salinger was at war, and sexual insecurity caused by having “only one testicle” (or an undescended testicle, which seems more likely). But “Salinger” the book also includes an anecdote about Salinger’s apprenticeship (imposed by his father) to a meat company in Vienna in the late 1930s, during which visit he fell in love with Viennese girl of 16. Salinger later fictionalized her in a story titled “A Girl I Knew,” praising her “immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing into their own innocence … When she sat down she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there.” The man’s fixation on very young, large-eyed and exquisitely simple girls seems to have been well in place before Oona broke his heart and the war ravaged his spirit.

Isn’t it just as likely that Salinger went into the war a rigid, unforgiving man, and that the war broke him in the way it broke many others, but all the more so because he lacked the flexibility to absorb its terrible truths? “Salinger” (book and film) amply documents the author’s youthful arrogance and selfishness, his infatuation with his own cleverness and his inability to see the world from the perspective of anyone who wasn’t a lot like himself — or whom he could imagine to be a lot like himself, as he did at the beginnings of his many short-lived romances. These traits preexisted the war and Oona’s “betrayal,” and this, combined with his immense, innate talent, may have given his fiction the concentration and the vividness that make his depictions of young people so persuasive. Besides, Salinger famously carried six chapters of “The Catcher in the Rye” with him on D-Day, the first action he saw. That novel, too, at least partially preexisted the war. It’s not always easy to accept that what gives some artists their access to greatness can also stunt them as human beings.

In a few, rare cases, the work transcends the hobbled souls who created it. Only nostalgia could interest me in the further adventures of Holden or the Glass family. But also waiting in that cache of manuscripts are at least two books about grown-ups, set during the war, and I am more than a little curious to see what Salinger made of that. Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com . A Tribute to the Private Life of J.D. Salinger on AbeBooks Letters to J.D. Salinger Chris Kubica Letters to J.D.Salinger includes more than 150 personal letters addressed to Salinger from well-known writers, editors, critics, journalists, and other luminaries, as well as from students, teachers, and readers around the world, some of whom have just discovered Salinger for the first time. Their voices testify to the lasting impressions Salinger's ideas and emotions have made on so many diverse lives. Did you know? Salinger viewed himself as the successor to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who also wrote great short stories.

Salinger vowed that none of his works would be adapted to film after Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was released as the 1950 tear-jerker, My Foolish Heart. During WWII, Salinger served in the Counter Intelligence Corps. J.D. Salinger worked as an apprentice in a Polish slaughterhouse while in Europe in 1937. The title The Catcher in the Rye was inspired by Robert Burns' poem Coming Through the Rye. The Catcher in the Rye has been both one of the most taught and one of the most banned books. The short story Blue Melody was originally called Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record but was renamed by Cosmopolitan Magazine prior to publication. Salinger dated Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill but the relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin. In 1941, Salinger did a brief stint on a Caribbean cruise ship as an activity director. A 53-year-old Salinger had a year-long relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard who later told of the relationship in her autobiography, At Home in the World: A Memoir .

In Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events series, the character Esmé Squalor is referenced. Salinger Quotes Find all Signet paperback editions . Salinger's quest for less put him in the news again in 2009 with his attempt to block the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by J.D. California – an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. The interest in this man never seemed to wane. The most expensive copy of The Catcher in the Rye (a first edition, first printing, in fine condition) sold by AbeBooks went for $11,000 earlier in 2009. Any document signed by the author instantly gained a four-figure price-tag. J.D. Salinger in 1951 An artist's depiction of what an older Salinger might look like. Jerome David Salinger was born on New Year's Day 1919 in Manhattan. He grew up in the Bronx and showed an early love of writing while working for his school newspaper at McBurney School. Salinger was first published in 1940 when Story Magazine printed a short story called The Young Folks.

In December 1941, The New Yorker accepted Slight Rebellion Off Madison, Salinger's story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with pre-war jitters. However, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor just days later and the story was spiked until 1946. Salinger served in the US army and was part of the Normandy Landings and the Battle of the Bulge, although he was writing continuously with a typewriter he hauled around Europe. He even enjoyed a war-time meeting with Ernest Hemingway , then a war correspondent in Paris. Salinger spent the rest of the conflict in counter-intelligence where he used his French and German to question prisoners of war. He also entered liberated concentration camps and was treated for combat stress. It is speculated his experiences inspired stories such as For Esmé with Love and Squalor . The Catcher in the Rye was hailed by The New York Times as "an unusually brilliant first novel." Within two months, it was reprinted eight times.

A year later, he was still doing interviews and he admitted to Book of the Month Club News he admired Kafka , Flaubert , Tolstoy , Chekhov , Dostoevsky , Proust , O'Casey , Rilke , Lorca , Keats , Rimbaud , Burns , Emily Brontë , Jane Austen , Henry James , Blake , and Coleridge but refused to name any living writers. Salinger in Story Magazine Find all copies of this issue As the 1950s wore on, every brooding teenager was seen grasping a much-thumbed copy of The Catcher in the Rye. The cult classic was banned in several countries and some North American schools because of Holden's foul language. This censorship continued for years. In 1961, Salinger, who had already been keeping a low profile since 1953, published Franny and Zooey . On the dustjacket, he wrote: "It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years." Naturally, he refused to reveal the most valuable property.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction was published in 1963. On 19 June 1965, the The New Yorker printed the last Salinger work to be published - a novella called Hapworth 16, 1924 that filled most of the magazine. Salinger in The New Yorker Pretty Mouth And Green My Eyes July 14, 1951 Find all editions of this story So Salinger lived the quiet life for more than 40 years and the world spent more than 40 years wondering what he was up to. Salinger's daughter, Margaret, wrote in her 1999 memoir, Dream Catcher , about her father's strong interest with various religions and alternative medicines. But Matt Salinger, Margaret's brother, publicly discredited many of Dream Catcher's claims in a letter to the New York Observer stating: "I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes." Not a great deal is known about Salinger's private life.

In 1953, he was interviewed by a high school student for the student page in The Daily Eagle, Cornish's local paper, but it was one of his last. He married Claire Douglas in 1955 and they had two children, divorcing in 1967. Biographies With Love and Squalor Kip Kotzen (Editor) In 1974, Salinger agreed to be interviewed by The New York Times so he could vent his fury at the unauthorized publication of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger . "It's unfair," he said. "Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel." In 1986, Salinger challenged British author Ian Hamilton over his biography In Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935-65) , because it revealed the contents of letters he had written to authors and friends. In 1988, he married a nurse called Colleen O'Neill, who was 40 years his junior.

In that final 1974 interview in the New York Times, Salinger said: "There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Fair enough. Salinger in The Saturday Evening Post Both Parties Concerned J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ Dies at 91 - The New York Times The New York Times Books |J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91 Search Continue reading the main story J. D. Salinger , who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91. Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes.

“Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.” Mr.

Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.” “Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Continue reading the main story Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit. The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D.

Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.” Many critics were more admiring of “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it) and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.” Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend.

Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.” As a young man Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of attention. He bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye” and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish.

He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.” He seldom left, except occasionally to vacation in Florida or to visit William Shawn, the almost equally reclusive former editor of The New Yorker. Avoiding Mr. Shawn’s usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin Hotel, they would meet under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, the rendezvous for generations of prep-school and college students. After Mr. Salinger moved to New Hampshire his publications slowed to a trickle and soon stopped completely. “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” both collections of material previously published in The New Yorker, came out in 1961 and 1963, and the last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In 1997 Mr.

Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out “Hapworth” in book form, but he backed out of the deal at the last minute. He never collected the rest of his stories or allowed any of them to be reprinted in textbooks or anthologies. One story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” was turned into “My Foolish Heart,” a movie so bad that Mr. Salinger was never tempted to sell film rights again. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Befriended, Then Betrayed In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property. He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.

It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up around him. Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of “Birdy,” was rumored to be Mr.

Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du Aime. In 1984 the British literary critic Ian Hamilton approached Mr. Salinger with the notion of writing his biography. Not surprisingly, Mr. Salinger turned him down, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Mr. Hamilton went ahead anyway, and in 1986, Mr. Salinger took him to court to prevent the use of quotations and paraphrases from unpublished letters. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and to the surprise of many, Mr. Salinger eventually won, though not without some cost to his cherished privacy. (In June 2009 he also sued Fredrik Colting, the Swedish author and publisher of a novel said to be a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye.” In July a federal judge indefinitely enjoined publication of the book.) Photo Credit Left, Lotte Jacobi Mr.

Salinger’s privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard — with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a college freshman — and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger’s son, Matthew, wrote in a letter to The New York Observer that his sister had “a troubled mind,” and that he didn’t recognize the man portrayed in her account. Both books nevertheless added a creepy, Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend. Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr.

Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box. But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or, like the character in the Stanley Kubrick film “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, though she had never seen them. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Early Life Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day, 1919, the second of two children. His sister, Doris, who died in 2001, was for many years a buyer in the dress department at Bloomingdale’s. Like the Glasses, the Salinger children were the product of a mixed marriage.

Their father, Sol, was a Jew, the son of a rabbi, but sufficiently assimilated that he made his living importing both cheese and ham. Their mother, Marie Jillisch, was of Irish descent, born in Scotland, but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws. The family was living in Harlem when Mr. Salinger was born, but then, as Sol Salinger’s business prospered, moved to West 82nd Street and then to Park Avenue. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Never much of a student, Mr. Salinger, then known as Sonny, attended the progressive McBurney School on the Upper West Side. (He told the admissions office his interests were dramatics and tropical fish.) But he flunked out after two years and in 1934 was packed off to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pa., which became the model for Holden’s Pencey Prep. Like Holden, Mr.

Salinger was the manager of the school fencing team, and he also became the literary editor of the school yearbook, Crossed Sabres, and wrote a wrote a poem that was either a heartfelt pastiche of 19th-century sentiment or else a masterpiece of irony: Hide not thy tears on this last day Your sorrow has no shame; To march no more midst lines of gray; No longer play the game. Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear? Then cherish now these fleeting days, The few while you are here. In 1937, after a couple of unenthusiastic weeks at New York University, Mr. Salinger traveled with his father to Austria and Poland, where the father’s plan was for him to learn the ham business. Deciding that wasn’t for him, he returned to America and drifted through a term or so at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Fellow students remember him striding around campus in a black chesterfield with velvet collar and announcing that he was going to write the Great American Novel. Mr.

Salinger’s most sustained exposure to higher education was an evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and under Mr. Burnett’s tutelage he managed to sell a story, “The Young Folks,” to Story magazine. He subsequently sold stories to Esquire, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post — formulaic work that gave little hint of real originality. In 1941, after several rejections, Mr. Salinger finally cracked The New Yorker, the ultimate goal of any aspiring writer back then, with a story, “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” that was an early sketch of what became a scene in “The Catcher in the Rye.” But the magazine then had second thoughts, apparently worried about seeming to encourage young people to run away from school, and held the story for five years — an eternity even for The New Yorker — before finally publishing it in 1946, buried in the back of an issue. Meanwhile Mr. Salinger had been drafted.

He served with the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose job was to interview Nazi deserters and sympathizers, and was stationed for a while in Tiverton, Devon, the setting of “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” probably the most deeply felt of the “Nine Stories.” On June 6, 1944, he landed at Utah Beach, and he later saw action during the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 he was hospitalized for “battle fatigue” — often a euphemism for a breakdown — and after recovering he stayed on in Europe past the end of the war, chasing Nazi functionaries. He married a German woman, very briefly — a doctor about whom biographers have been able to discover very little. Her name was Sylvia, Margaret Salinger said, but Mr. Salinger always called her Saliva. A Different Kind of Writer Back in New York, Mr. Salinger moved into his parents’ apartment and, having never stopped writing, even during the war, resumed his career. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” austere, mysterious and Mr.

Salinger’s most famous and still most discussed story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1948 and suggested, not wrongly, that he had become a very different kind of writer. And like so many writers he eventually found in The New Yorker not just an outlet but a kind of home and developed a close relationship with the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, himself famously shy and agoraphobic — a kindred spirit. In 1961 Mr. Salinger dedicated “Franny and Zooey” to Shawn, writing, “I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story As a young writer Mr. Salinger was something of a ladies’ man and dated, among others, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin.

In 1953 he met Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langdon Douglas, who was then a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore who in many ways resembled Franny Glass (or vice versa); they were married two years later. (Ms. Douglas had married and divorced in the meantime.) Margaret was born in 1955, and Matthew, now an actor and film producer, was born in 1960. But the marriage soon turned distant and isolating, and in 1966, Ms. Douglas sued for divorce, claiming that “a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.” The affair with Ms. Maynard, then a Yale freshman, began in 1972, after Mr. Salinger read an article she had written for The New York Times Magazine titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life.” They moved in together but broke up abruptly after 10 months when Mr. Salinger said he had no desire for more children. For a while in the ’80s Mr.

Salinger was involved with the actress Elaine Joyce, and late in that decade he married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse, who is considerably younger than he is. Not much is known about the marriage because Ms. O’Neill embraced her husband’s code of seclusion. Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O’Neill and his daughter, Margaret, as well as three grandsons. His literary agents said in a statement that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.” “Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it,” the statement said. “His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.” As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of notebooks devoted to the family. In Mr.

Salinger’s fiction the Glasses first turn up in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which Seymour, the oldest son and family favorite, kills himself while on vacation with his wife. Characters who turn out in retrospect to have been Glasses appear glancingly in “Nine Stories,” but the family saga really begins to be elaborated upon in “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roof Beam” and “Hapworth,” the long short story, which is ostensibly a letter written by Seymour from camp when he is just 7 years old but already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, wife of the camp owner. Readers also began to learn about the parents, Les and Bessie, long-suffering ex-vaudevillians, and Seymour’s siblings Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo; about the Glasses’ Upper West Side apartment; about the radio quiz show on which all the children appeared. Seldom has a fictional family been so lovingly or richly imagined. Too lovingly, some critics complained. With the publication of “Franny and Zooey” even staunch Salinger admirers began to break ranks.

John Updike wrote in The Times Book Review: “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.” Other readers hated the growing streak of Eastern mysticism in the saga, as Seymour evolved, in successive retellings, from a suicidal young man into a genius, a sage, even a saint of sorts. But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm contended, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, Ms. Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there. Correction: February 8, 2010 An obituary on Jan. 29 about the author J. D.

Salinger referred incorrectly to one element in the plot of his short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The character Seymour Glass commits suicide while on vacation with his wife, not while on his honeymoon. (The error also appeared in a news article on Aug. 31, 2000; a book review on Oct. 8, 2000; and in essays on March 23 and Dec. 31, 2008.) The obituary also misstated the name of the yearbook at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, for which Mr. Salinger was literary editor when he was a student there; it was Crossed Sabres, not Crossed Swords. And the obituary referred incorrectly to a work he had written while at Valley Forge. It was a poem that was later set to music; it was not a school song. A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: J. D. Salinger, Author Who Fled Fame, Dies at 91. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

Question: What is the title of the only published novel by J D Salinger?
Answer: The Catcher in the Rye