J.D. Salinger Dead: 'Catcher in the Rye' Author Dies At 91
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/28/j-d-salinger-dead-catcher_n_440500.html
HILLEL ITALIE
01/28/10
NEW YORK J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and
fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and
inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the
author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary
representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in
self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the
twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of
anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The
Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection,
advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel
will be "a source of wonder and delight and concern."
Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy,"
Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since
Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing more than 60
million copies worldwide and its impact incalculable. Decades after
publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most
American of dreams: to never grow up.
Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over
identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and
fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher"
presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness
of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only
intensified with the oncoming generation gap.
Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis
Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The
Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's
message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the
1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version
of Salinger's narrator.
"`Catcher in the Rye' made a very powerful and surprising impression
on me," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who read
the book, as so many did, when he was in middle school. "Part of it
was the fact that our seventh grade teacher was actually letting us
read such a book. But mostly it was because `Catcher' had such a
recognizable authenticity in the voice that even in 1977 or so, when
I read it, felt surprising and rare in literature."
The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan
Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's
novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book
holds many answers."
By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but
Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was
discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.
On the Web Thursday, there was an outpouring of sadness for the loss
of Salinger, as many flocked together on social networks to relate
their memories of "Catcher in the Rye." Topics such as "Salinger" and
"Holden Caufield" were among the most popular on Twitter. CNN's Larry
King tweeted that "Catcher" is his favorite book. Humorist John
Hodgman wrote: "I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to
become extra reclusive."
Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of
"Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great
affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as
a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.
The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the
little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and
Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest
for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his
mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.
"Everyone who works here and writes here at The New Yorker, even now,
decades after his silence began, does so with a keen awareness of
J.D. Salinger's voice," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker,
where many of Salinger's stories appeared. "In fact, he is so widely
read in America, and read with such intensity, that it's hard to
think of any reader, young and old, who does not carry around the
voices of Holden Caulfield or Glass family members."
"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden
recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for
failing four classes and for general apathy.
He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him
everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with
his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to
escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as
just so much phoniness.
"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he
reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know?
I swear it's a stupid question."
"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading,
periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents
worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.
"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked,
or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of `The Catcher in the
Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best
friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for
"20th Century Authors."
"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on
a shelf out of their reach," he added.
Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters" and "Seymour An Introduction," both featuring the
neurotic, fictional Glass family that appeared in much of his work.
His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker
in 1965. By then, he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child
whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the
greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented.
In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book
prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical
Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry
Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written
at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.
"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said
in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980.
"But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left
alone to do it."
Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His
father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family
lived for years on Park Avenue.
Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of
trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military
Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the
covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published
his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.
He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with
him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an
unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.
Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an
intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the
bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his
proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E.
Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of
cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced
that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville.
Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the
Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post.
Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New
Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.
The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews
were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York
Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and
observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when
contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."
But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive,
human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T.
Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.
"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a
book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too
easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by
writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or
good intention."
The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the
door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he
married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and
Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly
married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her.)
Meanwhile, he refused interviews, instructing his agent not to
forward fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in
a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those
deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."
"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless
conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something,
they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me.
I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."
Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of
"Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down
numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from
Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey
Weinstein were also rejected.
Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued
a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the
author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and
Salinger dropped the suit.
Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an
important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused
to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton,
that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had
copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which
came out in a revised edition in 1988.
In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's
"60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined
Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.
Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In
1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the
World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in
the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an
unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric
eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.
Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to
his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher"
portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine
and spoke in tongues.
Margaret Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely
determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."
.
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