Author - J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger in 1953, photographed by Lotte
Jacobi.
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Books
-
The 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)
- "Franny" (1955)
- "Zooey" (1957)
-
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An
Introduction (1963)
- "Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters"
(1955)
- "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959)
Published and anthologized
stories
- "Go See Eddie" (1940, republished in Fiction: Form
& Experience, ed. William M. Jones, 1969)
- "The Hang of It" (1941, republished in The Kit Book
for Soldiers, Sailors and Marines, 1943)
- "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" (1942, republished in
Stories: The Fiction of the Forties, ed. Whit
Burnett, 1949)
- "A Boy in France" (1945, republished in Post Stories
1942-45, ed. Ben Hibbs, 1946)
- "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (1945, republished in
The Armchair Esquire, ed. L. Rust Hills, 1959)
- "A Girl I Knew" (1948, republished in Best American
Short Stories 1949, ed. Martha Foley, 1949)
- "Slight Rebellion off Madison" (1946, republished in
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New
Yorker, ed. David Remnick, 2000)
Published and unanthologized
stories
- "The Young Folks" (1940)
- "The Heart of a Broken Story" (1941)
- "Personal Notes of an Infantryman" (1942)
- "The Varioni Brothers" (1943)
- "Both Parties Concerned" (1944)
- "Soft Boiled Sergeant" (1944)
- "Last Day of the Last Furlough" (1944)
- "Once a Week Won't Kill You" (1944)
- "Elaine" (1945)
- "The Stranger" (1945)
- "I'm Crazy" (1945)
- "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All" (1947)
- "The Inverted Forest" (1947)
- "Blue Melody" (1948)
- "Hapworth 16, 1924" (1965)
Unpublished and unanthologized
stories
- "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" (date unknown)
- "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" (date
unknown)
- "Two Lonely Men" (1944)
- "The Children's Echelon" (1944)
- "The Magic Foxhole" (1945)
J. D. Salinger Autograph and Signature Samples
 

Biograhpy of J. D. Salinger:
Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is
an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The
Catcher in the Rye, as well as for his reclusive nature. He
has not published a new work since 1965 and has not been
interviewed since 1980.
Raised in Manhattan, New York, 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 first 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.[1] The novel remains widely read,
selling about 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 three
collections of short stories: Nine Stories (1953),
Franny and Zooey (1961), and 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 in 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 1997, a small publisher
announced a deal with Salinger to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924"
in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity, the release was
delayed indefinitely.
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.[1] His father, Sol Salinger, was
a Jewish man of Polish origin who sold kosher cheese. When
they married, Salinger's mother changed her name to Miriam
and passed for Jewish. Salinger did not find out that his
mother was not Jewish until just after his bar
mitzvah.[2] He had only one sibling: his
sister Doris, who was born in 1911.[3]
The young Salinger attended public schools on the West Side
of Manhattan, then moved to the private McBurney School for
ninth and tenth grades. 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.[4] He was happy to get away from
his over-protective mother by entering the Valley Forge
Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania.[5] Though he had written for the
school newspaper at McBurney, at Valley Forge Salinger
began writing stories "under the covers [at night], with
the aid of a flashlight."[6] He started his freshman year
at New York University in 1936, and considered studying
special education,[7] 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.[8]
He left Austria only a month or so before the country fell
to Hitler, on March 12, 1938. He attended Ursinus College in
Collegeville, Pennsylvania, for only one semester. 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.[9] 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.[9] Salinger's debut short story
was published in the magazine's March-April 1940 issue.
Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded
for several years.[10]
World War II
In 1941, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of
the playwright Eugene O'Neill. 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.[11] Their relationship ended when
Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually
married in June 1943 despite a 36-year age difference
(Chaplin was 54 and O'Neill was 18.)[12] In late 1941, Salinger
briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an
activity director and possibly as a performer.[13]
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to
The New Yorker. A selective magazine, it rejected seven
of Salinger's stories that year, including "Lunch for Three,"
"Monologue for a Watery Highball," and "I Went to School with
Adolf Hitler." In December 1941, however, it accepted "Slight
Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about a
disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war
jitters."[14] When Japan carried out the
attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered
"unpublishable"; it did not appear in the magazine until
1946.[14] In the spring of 1942,
several months after the United States entered World War
II, Salinger was drafted into the Army, where he saw
combat with the U.S. 12th Infantry Regiment in some of the
fiercest fighting of the war.[13] He was active at Utah Beach
on D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge.[15]
Author Ernest Hemingway in 1939. During
World War II, the two writers met and
corresponded.
During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger
arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had
influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in
Paris.[16] Salinger was impressed with
Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more
"soft" than his gruff public persona.[17] Hemingway was impressed by
Salinger's writing, and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva
talent."[1] The two writers began
corresponding; Salinger wrote Hemingway in July 1946 that
their talks were among his few positive memories of the
war.[17] Salinger added that he was
working on a play about Holden Caulfield, the protagonist
of his story "Slight Rebellion off Madison," and hoped to
play the part himself.[17]
Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division,
where he used his proficiency in French and German to
interrogate prisoners of war.[18] He was also among the first
soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.[18] Salinger's experiences in the
war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a
few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was
defeated,[19][20] 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."[21] Both of his biographers
speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences
in several stories,[22] such as "For Esmé with Love
and Squalor," which is narrated by a traumatized soldier.
Salinger wrote while serving, and published several
stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and
the Saturday Evening Post. 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.[14]
Post-war years
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month
period of "de-Nazification" duty in Germany.[23] He met a woman named Sylvia,
and they married in 1945.[24] He brought her to the United
States, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and
Sylvia returned to Germany.[24] In 1972, his daughter
Margaret was with her father 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."[25]
In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a
collection of his short stories through Lippincott's
Story Press imprint.[26] 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.[26] 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.[26] Salinger blamed Burnett for
the book's failure to see print, and the two became
estranged.[27]
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"[1] and arranged a meeting with
Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki. 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.[28] 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.[29] "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.[30] Salinger eventually published
seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed
family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the
troubled eldest child.[30]
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.[31] According to Ian Hamilton,
Salinger was disappointed when "rumblings from Hollywood"
over his 1943 short story "The Varioni Brothers" came to
nothing. Therefore he immediately agreed when, in
mid-1948, independent film producer Samuel Goldwyn offered
to buy the film rights to his short story "Uncle Wiggily
in Connecticut."[31] Though Salinger sold his
story with the hope — in the words of his agent Dorothy
Olding — that it "would make a good movie,"[32] the film version of "Wiggly"
was lambasted by critics upon its release in 1949.[33] Renamed My Foolish
Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the
melodramatic film departed to such an extent from
Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg
referred to it as a “bastardization”.[33] As a result of this
experience, Salinger never again permitted film
adaptations to be made from his work.[34]
The Catcher in the
Rye
Salinger's landmark 1951 novel, The
Catcher in the Rye.
In the 1940s, Salinger confided to several people that he
was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage
protagonist of his short story "Slight Rebellion off
Madison,"[35] and The Catcher in the
Rye was published on July 16, 1951. The novel's plot
is simple,[36] detailing sixteen-year-old
Holden's experiences in New York City following his
expulsion from an elite prep school. The book is more
notable for the iconic persona and testimonial voice of
its first-person narrator, Holden.[37] He serves as an insightful
but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of
loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own
duplicity.[37] 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.… [I]t was a great relief telling people about
it."[38]
Initial reactions were mixed, ranging from The New York
Times's praise of Catcher as "an unusually brilliant
first novel"[39] to denigrations of the book's
monotonous language and the "immorality and perversion" of
Holden,[40] who uses religious slurs and
casually discusses premarital sex and
prostitution.[41] The novel was a popular
success; within two months of its publication, The
Catcher in the Rye had been reprinted eight times, and
spent thirty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller
list.[36]
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."[42] Newspapers began publishing
articles about the "Catcher Cult",[42] 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".[43] One irate parent counted 237
appearances of the word "goddamn" in the novel, along with
58 "bastard"s, 31 "Chrissakes," and 6 "fucks."[43]
In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned
the book were fired or forced to resign. In 1979 one
book-length study of censorship noted that The Catcher in
the Rye "had the dubious distinction of being at once the
most frequently censored book across the nation and the
second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools
[after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men]."[44] The book remains widely read;
as of 2004, the novel was selling about 250,000 copies per
year, "with total worldwide sales over – probably way over
– 10 million."[45]
In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received (and
rejected) numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the
Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel
Goldwyn.[33] Since its publication, there
has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers,
with Billy Wilder,[46] Harvey Weinstein, and Steven
Spielberg[47] among those seeking to secure
the rights. Salinger stated in the 1970s that "Jerry Lewis
tried for years to get his hands on the part of
Holden."[48] 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. D. Salinger."[48]
Writing in the 1950s and
move to Cornish
In a July 1951 profile in Book of the Month Club
News, Salinger's friend and New Yorker editor
William Maxwell asked Salinger about his literary influences.
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. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake,
Coleridge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's
right."[49] In letters written in the
1940s, Salinger had expressed his admiration of three
living, or recently-deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson,
Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;[50] Ian Hamilton wrote that
Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's
successor."[51]
After several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, in 1952,
while reading the gospels of Hindu religious teacher Sri
Ramakrishna, Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in
his life.[52] He became an adherent of
Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated
celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment
from human responsibilities such as family.[53][54] Salinger also studied the
writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in the
story "Hapworth 16, 1924", the character of Seymour Glass
describes him as "one of the most exciting, original and
best-equipped giants of this century."[53]
In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories
from The New Yorker ("Bananafish" among them), as well
as two that the magazine had rejected. The collection was
published as Nine Stories in the United States, and
For Esmé with Love and Squalor in the UK, after one of
Salinger's best-known stories.[55] The book received grudgingly
positive reviews, and was a financial success –
"remarkably so for a volume of short stories," according
to Hamilton.[56] Nine Stories spent
three months on the New York Times Bestseller
list.[56] Already tightening his grip
on publicity, though, Salinger refused to allow publishers
of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket
illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of
them.
As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew,
Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved
from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time at
Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students
at Windsor High School. Salinger invited them to his house
frequently to play records and talk about problems at
school.[57] One such student, Shirley
Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high
school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper.
However, after Blaney's interview appeared prominently in
the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all
contact with the high schoolers without
explanation.[57] He was also seen less
frequently around town, only seeing one close friend with
any regularity, jurist Learned Hand.[58]
Marriage, family, and
religious beliefs
In June 1955, at the age of 36, Salinger married Claire
Douglas, a Radcliffe student. They had two children, Margaret
(b. December 10, 1955) and Matt (b. February 13, 1960.)
Margaret Salinger wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that
she believes her parents would not have married – nor would she
have been born – had her father not read the teachings of a
disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, which held out the
possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the
"householder" (a married person with children).[59] After their marriage, J.D.
and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya yoga in a
small store-front Hindu temple in Washington, D.C., during
the summer of 1955.[60] They received a mantra and
breathing exercises to practice for ten minutes twice a
day.[60]
Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and
live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she
did. Certain elements of the story "Franny", published in
January, 1955, are based on his relationship with Claire,
including the fact that Claire owned the book The Way of the
Pilgrim.[61] Due to their isolated
location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw
other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also
frustrated by J.D.'s ever-changing religious beliefs.
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."[62] 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."[62]
After abandoning Kriya yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics (the
forerunner of Scientology), even meeting its founder L. Ron
Hubbard, according to Claire.[62][63] This was followed by
adherence to a number of spiritual, medical, and
nutritional belief systems including Christian Science,
homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics, the teachings of
Edgar Cayce, fasting, vomiting to remove impurities,
megadoses of Vitamin C, urine therapy, "speaking in
tongues" (or Charismatic glossolalia), and sitting in a
Reichian "orgone box" to accumulate "orgone
energy".[64][65][66][67]
Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after
the first child was born; according to Margaret, Claire felt
that her daughter had replaced her in Salinger's
affections.[68] The infant Margaret was sick
much of the time, but Salinger, having embraced the tenets
of Christian Science, refused to take her to a
doctor.[69] According to Margaret, her
mother admitted to her years later that she went "over the
edge" in the winter of 1957 and had made plans to murder
her thirteen-month-old infant and then commit suicide.
Claire had intended to do it during a trip to New York
City with Salinger, but she instead acted on a sudden
impulse to take Margaret from the hotel and run away.
After a few months, Salinger persuaded her to return to
Cornish.[69]
Last publications and
Maynard relationship
Time magazine analyzed Salinger's
"life of a recluse" in a 1961 cover story.
Salinger published the collections Franny and Zooey
in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and
Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. Each book contained two
short stories or novellas, previously published in The New
Yorker, about members of the Glass family. On the dust
jacket of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference
to his interest in privacy: "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."[70]
On September 15, 1961, Time magazine devoted its
cover to Salinger, in an article that profiled his "life of
recluse"; Time reported that the Glass family series "is
nowhere near completion…Salinger intends to write a Glass
trilogy".[1] However, Salinger has only
published one other story since. His last published work
was "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. Around this time, Salinger had
isolated Claire from friends and relatives and made her –
in the words of Margaret Salinger – "a virtual
prisoner".[62] Claire separated from him in
September 1966; their divorce was finalized on October 3,
1967.[71]
In 1972, at the age of 53, Salinger had a year-long
relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard, already an
experienced writer for Seventeen magazine. 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. Salinger wrote a
letter to her warning about living with fame. After exchanging
25 letters, Maynard moved in with Salinger the summer after her
freshman year at Yale University.[72] Maynard did not return to
Yale that fall, and spent ten months as a guest in
Salinger's Cornish home. The relationship ended, he told
his daughter Margaret at a family outing, because Maynard
wanted children, and he felt he was too old.[73]
Salinger continued to write in a disciplined fashion, a few
hours every morning; according to Maynard, by 1972 he had
completed two new novels.[74][75] In a rare 1974 interview with
The New York Times, he explained: "There is a
marvelous peace in not publishing.… I like to write. I
love to write. But I write just for myself and my own
pleasure."[76] According to Maynard, he saw
publication as "a damned interruption".[77] In her memoir, Margaret
Salinger describes the detailed filing system her father
had for his unpublished manuscripts: "A red mark meant, if
I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue
meant publish but edit first, and so on."[78]
Legal conflicts in 1980s
and 1990s
Although Salinger tried to escape public exposure as much as
possible, he continued to struggle with unwanted attention from
both the media and the public.[79] Readers of his work and
students from nearby Dartmouth College often came to
Cornish in groups, hoping to catch a glimpse of
him.[80] Upon learning in 1986 that
the British writer Ian Hamilton intended to publish In
Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935-65), a
biography including letters Salinger had written to other
authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the book's
publication. The book was finally published in 1988 with
the letters' contents paraphrased. The court ruled that
Hamilton's extensive use of the letters went beyond the
limits of fair use, and that "the author of letters is
entitled to a copyright in the letters, as with any other
work of literary authorship."[81]
An unintended consequence of the lawsuit was that many
details of Salinger's private life, including that he had spent
the last twenty years writing, in his words, "Just a work of
fiction.… That's all",[34] became public in the form of
court transcripts. 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. Chaplin squatting
grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his
thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead
rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from
the bathroom.[81][12]
Salinger was romantically involved with television actress
Elaine Joyce for several years in the 1980s.[72] The relationship ended when
he met Colleen O'Neill (b. June 11, 1959), a nurse and
quiltmaker, whom he married around 1988.[82] O'Neill, forty years his
junior, once told Margaret Salinger that she and Salinger
were trying to have a child.[83]
In 1995, Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui released the film
Pari, an unauthorized and loose adaptation of Salinger's
Franny and Zooey. Though the film could be distributed
legally in Iran since the country has no official copyright
relations with the United States,[84] Salinger had his lawyers
block a planned screening of the film at the Lincoln
Center in 1998.[85] Mehrjui called Salinger's
action "bewildering", explaining that he saw his film as
"a kind of cultural exchange".[85]
In 1997 Salinger gave a small publisher, Orchises Press,
permission to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924," the previously
uncollected novella. It was to be published that year, and
listings for it appeared at Amazon.com and other book-sellers.
After a flurry of articles and critical reviews of the story
appeared in the press, the publication date was pushed back
repeatedly, the last time to 2002. It was not published and no
new date has been set.[86]
Recent privacy
invasions
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. Maynard's memoir of her
life and her relationship with Salinger, At Home in the
World: A Memoir, was published the same year. Among other
indiscretions, the book described how Maynard's mother had
consulted with her on how to appeal to the aging author, and
described Maynard's relationship with him at length. In the
ensuing controversy over both the memoir and the letters,
Maynard claimed that she was forced to auction the letters for
financial reasons; she would have preferred to donate them to
Beinecke Library. Software developer Peter Norton bought the
letters for $156,500 and announced his intention to return them
to Salinger.[87]
Margaret Salinger's memoir Dream
Catcher, its cover featuring a rare
photograph of Salinger.
A year later, Salinger's daughter Margaret, by his second
wife Claire Douglas, published Dream Catcher: A Memoir.
In her book, Ms. Salinger described the harrowing control
Salinger had over her mother and dispelled many of the Salinger
myths established by Ian Hamilton's book. One of Hamilton's
arguments was that Salinger's experience with Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder left him psychologically scarred, and that he
was unable to deal with the traumatic nature of his war
service. Though Ms. Salinger allowed that "the few men who
lived through ['bloody Mortain,' a battle in which her father
fought] were left with much to sicken them, body and
soul,"[88] she also painted a picture of
J.D. as a man immensely proud of his service record,
maintaining his military haircut, service jacket, and
moving about his compound (and town) in an old Jeep.
Both Margaret and Maynard characterized Salinger as a
devoted film buff. According to Margaret, his favorite movies
include Gigi, The Lady Vanishes, The 39
Steps (Phoebe's favorite movie in The Catcher in the
Rye), and the comedies of W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy,
and the Marx Brothers.[89] Predating VCRs, Salinger had
an extensive collection of classic movies from the 1940s
in 16 mm prints. Maynard wrote that "he loves movies,
not films",[90] and his daughter argued that
her father's "worldview is, essentially, a product of the
movies of his day. To my father, all Spanish speakers are
Puerto Rican washerwomen, or the toothless, grinning gypsy
types in a Marx Brothers movie."[91]
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. A few weeks after Dream Catcher
was published, Margaret's brother Matt discredited the memoir
in a letter to The New York Observer. He disparaged his
sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and stated:
"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."[92]
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.[93] 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. In 1961, the critic
Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers
as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young
readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths]
that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a
language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a
vision of things that capture their most secret judgments
of the world."[94] Salinger's language,
especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue,
was revolutionary at the time his first stories were
published, and was seen by several critics as "the most
distinguishing thing" about his work.[95]
Salinger identified closely with his
characters,[77] and used techniques such as
interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls
to display his gift for dialogue. Such style elements also
"[gave] him the illusion of having, as it were, delivered
his characters' destinies into their own keeping."[96] 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",[97] the disconnect between
teenagers and "phony" adults,[97] and the perceptive,
precocious intelligence of children.[22]
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.[98][92] 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. It took the standards
of The New Yorker editors, among them William
Shawn, to refine his writing into the "spare, teasingly
mysterious, withheld" qualities of "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish", The Catcher in the Rye, and his
stories of the early 1950s.[99] By the late 1950s, as
Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious
study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less
plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and
parenthetical remarks.[100] Louis Menand agrees, writing
in The New Yorker that Salinger "stopped writing
stories, in the conventional sense.… He seemed to lose
interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought
there was something manipulative or inauthentic about
literary device and authorial control."[22] In recent years, Salinger's
later work has been defended by some critics; in 2001,
Janet Malcolm wrote in The New York Review of Books
that "Zooey" "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece.…
Rereading it and its companion piece "Franny" is no less
rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby."[92]
Influence
Salinger's writing has influenced several prominent writers,
prompting Harold Brodkey (himself an O. Henry Award-winning
author) to state in 1991: "His is the most influential body of
work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway."[101] Of the writers in Salinger's
generation, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike
attested that "the short stories of J. D. 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.… [Reading Salinger] stick[s] in my mind
as really having moved me a step up, as it were, toward
knowing how to handle my own material."[102] 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."[22]
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."[103] 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. Henry Award-winning short story "For Jeromé—With
Love and Kisses" (1977, collected in What I Know So
Far, 1984), is a parody of Salinger's "For Esmé—with
Love and Squalor."[104]
In 2001, Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker that
"Catcher in the Rye rewrites" among each new generation
had become "a literary genre all its own."[22] He classed among them Sylvia
Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S. Thompson's
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay
McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and
Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius (2000). The writer Aimee Bender was struggling
with her first short stories when a friend gave her a copy
of Nine Stories; inspired, she later described
Salinger's effect on writers, explaining: "[I]t feels like
Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a day, and
that incredible feeling of ease inspires writing. Inspires
the pursuit of voice. Not his voice. My voice. Your
voice."[105] Authors such as Stephen
Chbosky,[106] Carl Hiaasen, Susan
Minot,[107] Haruki Murakami, Gwendoline
Riley,[108] Tom Robbins, Louis
Sachar,[109] and Joel Stein,[110] along with Academy
Award-nominated writer-director Wes Anderson, have cited
Salinger as an influence.
Notes
- Skow, John. "Sonny: An
Introduction", Time, 1961-09-15. Retrieved on
2007-04-12.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 20.
- Alexander (1999). p. 32.
- Lutz (2001). p. 10.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 31.
- Alexander (1999). p. 42.
- Fiene, Donald M. "A
Bibliographical Study of J. D. Salinger: Life, Work,
and Reputation," M.A. Thesis, University of Louisville,
1962.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
39.
- Alexander (1999). p.
55-58. Burnett's quotes were included in Fiction
Writer's Handbook, edited by Whit and Hallie
Burnett and published in 1975.
- Alexander (1999). p. 55,
63-65.
- Scovell, Jane (1998). Oona Living
in the Shadows: A Biography of Oona O'Neill
Chaplin. New York: Warner. ISBN
0-446-51730-5.
p. 87.
- Sheppard, R.Z.
"Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted: In Search of J.D.
Salinger by Ian Hamilton", Time, 1988-03-23.
Retrieved on 2007-04-14.
- Lutz (2001). p. 18.
- Yagoda, Ben (2000). About Town:
The New Yorker and the World It Made. New
York: Scribner. ISBN 0-684-81605-9.
pp. 98, 233.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 58.
- Lamb, Robert Paul. "Hemingway
and the creation of twentieth-century dialogue -
American author Ernest Hemingway" (reprint), Twentieth
Century Literature, Winter 1996. Retrieved on
2007-07-10.
- Baker, Carlos (1969). Ernest
Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons. ISBN 0-020-01690-5.
p. 420, 646.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.55
- Hamilton (1988). p. 89.
- Lutz (2001). p. 7.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 55.
- Menand, Louis. "Holden at
Fifty: The Catcher in the Rye and what it
spawned" (reprint), The New Yorker, 2001-10-01.
Retrieved on 2007-07-10.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 67.
- Alexander (1999). p.
113.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
359.
- Alexander (1999). p.
118-20.
- Alexander (1999). p. 120, 164,
204-5.
- Alexander (1999). p. 124.
- Alexander (1999). p. 130.
- Crawford (2006). p.
97-99.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 75.
- Fosburgh, Lacey. "Why More Top
Novelists Don't Go Hollywood" (fee required), The New
York Times, 1976-11-21. Retrieved on 2007-04-06.
- Berg, A. Scott. Goldwyn: A
Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ISBN
1-57322-723-4. p. 446.
- "Depositions Yield J. D.
Salinger Details" (fee required), The New York Times,
1986-12-12. Retrieved on 2007-04-14.
- Alexander (1999). p. 142.
- Whitfield (1997). p. 77.
- Nandel, Alan. "The
Significance of Holden Caulfield's Testimony".
Reprinted in Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical
Interpretations: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the
Rye. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.
p. 75–89.
- Crawford (2006). p. 4.
- Burger, Nash K. "Books of The
Times", The New York Times, 1951-07-16. Retrieved on
2007-07-10.
- Whitfield, Stephen J.
"Raise High the Bookshelves, Censors!" (book review),
The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2002. Retrieved
on 2007-11-27. In a review of the book in The
Christian Science Monitor, the reviewer found the
book unfit "for children to read," writing that they
would be influenced by Holden, "as too easily happens
when immorality and perversion are recounted by writers
of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art
or good intention."
- Hamilton (1988). p. 117.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 155.
- Whitfield (1997). p.
97.
- Whitfield (1997). p. 82,
78.
- Yardley, Jonathan. "J.D.
Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly", The
Washington Post, 2004-10-19. Retrieved on 2007-04-13.
- Crowe, Cameron, ed.
Conversations with Wilder. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1999. ISBN 0-375-40660-3. p. 299.
- PAGE SIX; Inside Salinger's
Own World. New York Post (2003-12-04). Retrieved on
2007-01-18.
- Maynard (1998). p. 93.
- Silverman, Al, ed. The Book
of the Month: Sixty Years of Books in American
Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. ISBN
0-316-10119-2. pp. 129–130.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 53.
- Hamilton (1988) p. 64.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 127.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 129.
- Ranchan, Som P. (1989). An
Adventure in Vedanta: J. D. Salinger's The Glass
Family. Delhi: Ajanta. ISBN
81-202-0245-7.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 92.
- Hamilton (1988). pp.
136-7.
- Crawford (2006). p.
12-14.
- Lutz (2001). p. 30.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
89.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
90.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 84.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
94-5.
- Smith, Dinitia. "Salinger's
Daughter's Truths as Mesmerizing as His Fiction", The
New York Times, 2000-08-30. Retrieved on 2007-03-09.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 94-5.
Mentions Salinger's interest in Christian Science,
Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, acupuncture, and
macrobiotics.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 195.
Mentions Salinger's interest in fasting and vomiting to
remove impurities.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 219.
Mentions Salinger's interest in megadoses of Vitamin
C.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
96. Mentions Salinger's interest in urine therapy,
glossolalia, and orgone energy.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
115.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
115-116.
- "People", Time, 1961-08-04.
Retrieved on 2007-07-10.
- Lutz (2001). p. 35.
- Alexander, Paul. "J. D.
Salinger’s Women", New York, 1998-02-09. Retrieved on
2007-04-12.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
361-2.
- Maynard (1998). p. 158.
- Pollitt, Katha. "With Love and
Squalor", The New York Times, 1998-09-13. Retrieved on
2007-04-14.
- Fosburgh, Lacey. "J. D.
Salinger Speaks About His Silence", The New York Times,
1974-11-03. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- Maynard (1998). p. 97.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
307.
- Lutz (2001). p. 33.
- Crawford (2006). p. 79.
- Lubasch, Arnold H. "Salinger
Biography is Blocked", The New York Times, 1987-01-30.
Retrieved on 2007-04-14.
- Alexander, Paul. "J. D.
Salinger’s Women", New York, 1998-02-09. Retrieved on
2007-04-12.
The 1998 article mentions that "the
couple has been 'married for about ten years.'"
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
108.
- Circular 38a of the U.S.
Copyright Office
- Mckinley, Jesse. "Iranian
Film Is Canceled After Protest By Salinger", The New
York Times, 1998-11-21. Retrieved on 2007-04-05.
- Lutz (2001). p. 42-3.
- "Salinger letters bring
$156,500 at auction", CNN, 1999-06-22. Retrieved on
2007-04-12.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 55.
- Salinger, M (2000). p. 7.
- Maynard (1998). p. 94.
- Salinger, M (2000). p.
195.
- Malcolm, Janet. "Justice
to J. D. Salinger", The New York Review of Books,
2001-06-21. Retrieved on 2007-04-16.
- Whitfield (1997). p. 96.
- Kazin, Alfred. "J.D. Salinger:
"Everybody's Favorite"," The Atlantic Monthly 208.2,
Aug. 1961. Rpt. in Bloom, Harold, ed.
(2001) Bloom's BioCritiques: J.
D. Salinger. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
ISBN 0-7910-6175-2.
pp. 67-75.
- Shuman, R. Baird, ed. Great
American Writers: Twentieth Century. Vol. 13. New
York: Marshall Cavendish, 2002. 14 vols. p. 1308.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 70.
- Mondloch, Helen. "Squalor
and Redemption: The Age of Salinger," The World &
I. SIRS Knowledge Source: SIRS Renaissance. Nov. 2003.
Retrieved on 2004-04-02.
- Lutz (2001). p. 34.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 105-6.
- Hamilton (1988). p. 188.
- Brozan, Nadine. "Chronicle",
The New York Times, 1991-04-27. Retrieved on
2007-07-10.
- Osen, Diane. "Interview with
John Updike", The National Book Foundation. 2007.
Retrieved on 2007-07-10.
- Yates, Richard. "Writers'
Writers" (fee required), The New York Times,
1977-12-04. Retrieved on 2007-10-24. Relevant passage
is excerpted on richardyates.org.
- Gordon Lish Criticism
- Bender, Aimee. "Holden
Schmolden." Kotzen, Kip, and Thomas Beller, ed. With
Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of
J.D. Salinger. New York: Broadway, 2001. ISBN
978-076-790799-6. pp. 162-9.
- Beisch, Ann. "Interview with
Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a
Wallflower", LA Youth, November-December 2001.
Retrieved on 2007-07-10.
- "What Authors Influenced
You?", Authorsontheweb.com. Retrieved on 2007-07-10.
Both Hiaasen and Minot cite him as an influence
here.
- "You have to trawl the depths",
The Guardian, 2007-04-25. Retrieved on 2007-12-26.
- "Author Bio", Louis Sachar's
Official Web Site, 2002. Retrieved on 2007-07-14.
- Stein, Joel. "The Yips."
Kotzen, Kip, and Thomas Beller, ed. With Love and
Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D.
Salinger. New York: Broadway, 2001. ISBN
978-076-790799-6. pp. 170-6.
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