(LA Times) J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' dies at 91
Matthew Kruk
latimes.com
J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' dies at 91
Salinger, whose 1951 novel created a lasting symbol of teenage
discontent, died Wednesday at his remote New Hampshire home. He refused
interviews for years and published his last story in 1965.
By Elaine Woo
10:48 AM PST, January 28, 2010
J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature's most famous recluses,
who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel
"The Catcher in the Rye," died Wednesday. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes at his home in Cornish, N.H., the
Associated Press reported, quoting the author's son in a statement from
Salinger's literary representative.
Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and
critical interest as Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized
collections of short stories and an additional 21 stories that only
appeared in magazines in the 1940s. He abandoned publishing in 1965,
when his last story -- "Hapworth 26, 1924" -- was published by the New
Yorker. Rarely seen in public and aggressively averse to most publicity,
he was often called the Howard Hughes of American letters.
His silence inspired a range of reactions from literary critics, some
characterizing it as a form of cowardice and others as a cunning
strategy that, despite its outward intentions, helped preserve his
mythic status in American culture. Still others interpreted his
withdrawal as the deliberate spiritual stance of a man who, shying from
the glare of celebrity, immersed himself in Eastern religions,
particularly Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedantic philosophy.
His stories -- heavily autobiographical, humorous and cynical -- focused
on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking meaning in a world
transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which Salinger was a
direct participant.
His stellar fictional creation was Holden Caulfield, the teenage
anti-hero of "The Catcher in the Rye," who was, like Salinger,
unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world he perceived
as disingenuous and hostile to his needs.
A prototypical misfit, Caulfield apparently became a fixation for the
criminally disturbed, including Mark David Chapman, who killed John
Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Reagan. But Caulfield
also cared about children and other innocents, exhibiting moral outrage
and a compassion for underdogs that resonated with the generation that
came of age in the 1960s.
When renowned psychiatrist Robert Coles lived among civil rights
activists in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, "scarcely a
day went by that Salinger's name wasn't mentioned," he recalled in an
article for the New Republic almost two decades later. Tom Hayden, the
former '60s radical and California legislator who read "Catcher" as a
teenager, called Caulfield one of several "alternative cultural models,"
along with novelists Jack Kerouac and actor James Dean, whose life
crises "spawned not only political activism, but also the cultural
revolution of rock and roll."
"Catcher" began to appear on college reading lists in the 1960s along
with Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse
Five", but critic John Seelye, among other analysts, would later
conclude that in "acting as a transcendental Special Prosecutor of Adult
Values and making straight the way for the protest movements of the
'60s," Salinger led the way.
In the ensuing decades "Catcher" became one of the most banned and most
taught books in the country. Salinger also created the neurotic Glass
family, who first appeared in stories published in the 1940s and '50s.
Among the best known are two long pieces published in the New Yorker in
the 1950s and later combined in the book "Franny and Zooey" by Little,
Brown in 1961. The Glasses also were featured in the collections "Nine
Stories" (1953) and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour:
An Introduction" (1963).
An unauthorized collection, "The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of
J.D. Salinger," was mysteriously published in 1974 and went out of print
after some 25,000 copies were sold. It contained 21 pieces that
originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s but that Salinger never
wanted reprinted. The bootlegged edition so outraged the author that he
broke two decades of silence when he sued to stop its sale.
In a rare interview, Salinger not only condemned the pirating but tried
to explain his extraordinary reluctance to share his writing with
readers.
"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," he told the New York
Times in 1974. "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."
In 1997, the announcement by a small literary press that it would
reprint his last work -- the novella-length "Hapworth 16, 1924, " which
was originally published in 1965 -- caused excitement among a legion of
hungry Salinger devotees. But the book never materialized, its
cancellation as mysterious as the author who had led a hermitic life on
a 99-acre estate in Cornish, N.H., since 1953.
Fans regularly traveled to the remote New England hamlet to find
Salinger but rarely made contact. He lived on a hill behind high walls,
where a sign warned trespassers to keep out. He steadfastly ignored
almost all interview requests and aggressively discouraged biographers'
efforts to examine his life. He would not allow his photograph or
personal information to appear on his book jackets. He even refused fan
mail. "He just doesn't want anything to do with the rest of us," Lillian
Ross, the longtime New Yorker writer and Salinger friend, once noted.
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day, 1919.
His Scotch-Irish mother, Marie Jillich, changed her name to Miriam when
she married Sol Salinger, a well-to-do importer of meats and cheeses.
Jerome, known as Sonny, and his sister, Doris, who was eight years
older, grew up on the fashionable East Side of Manhattan.
Sonny attended several public schools and the private McBurney School,
racking up poor grades at all of them. According to biographer Paul
Alexander, McBurney officials offered this withering appraisal when they
kicked him out: "Character: Rather hard-hit by [adolescence] his last
year with us. Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word."
In desperation, his father sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in
Pennsylvania. It was there, holding a flashlight under the covers of his
dormitory bed, that Salinger first began to write. His grades improved,
and in 1936 Valley Forge awarded him what was to be his only diploma.
In April 1942, five months after Japan attacked the United States at
Pearl Harbor, Salinger joined the Army but did not stop writing. He
carried his typewriter all over Europe, reportedly even taking it with
him into foxholes, and had several stories published in the Saturday
Evening Post.
In 1944, Salinger, who was serving in counterintelligence, landed with
the 4th Infantry Division at Normandy on D-Day and stayed on through
some of the war's bloodiest campaigns, including the Battle of the
Bulge. According to Hamilton, the young writer may have experienced a
nervous breakdown in July 1945, after fighting for nearly a year during
the advance on Berlin. He was hospitalized in Nuremberg, where he wrote
to his new friend, Ernest Hemingway, that he faced the possibility of a
psychiatric discharge; he was presumed to have earned a regular
discharge before returning to civilian life in November of that year.
Stories that Salinger published around this time concerned soldiers on
the verge of emotional collapse, including the first story narrated by
Holden Caulfield. Published in Colliers in December 1945, it was titled
"I'm Crazy."
Just before he left the Army, Salinger married a French woman named
Sylvia, about whom little is known. She was thought to be a doctor with
Nazi ties who, according to the author's daughter, Margaret Salinger,
"hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis." The eight-month marriage ended
in mid-1946 during a vacation in Florida, in a hotel much like the one
Salinger would describe two years later in "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish." Considered one of his finest stories, it features the sage
but mentally fragile Seymour Glass, who is just released from an Army
hospital and on holiday in Florida with his bride, and ends in an
inexplicable tragedy. The same year that his marriage ended, Salinger
received welcome news: The New Yorker had finally decided to publish a
story of his that it had been holding for five years. The main character
of "Slight Rebellion Off Madison Avenue" was Caulfield, again in the
middle of a nervous breakdown. "Slight Rebellion" later became the basis
for a chapter in "The Catcher in the Rye."
Salinger was tall (over 6 feet) and darkly handsome. He married his
second wife, Claire Douglas, in 1955, when she was a 19-year-old
Radcliffe student and he was a 34-year-old rising literary star. The
marriage produced two children: Margaret Ann, born in 1955, and Matthew,
born in 1960.
Salinger married a third time, to Colleen O'Neill. Little is known about
her except that she had worked as a nurse and was about 50 years younger
than Salinger.
What critic George Steiner once called "The Salinger Industry" -- the
curiosity and speculation surrounding the enigmatic author and his
works -- continued to thrive into the early 2000s, when some critics
felt compelled to pronounce that Salinger was no longer relevant, that
"Catcher" was a "minor classic" at best, or that "Franny and Zooey" was
the more skillful work. "Zooey," writer Janet Malcolm declared in the
New York Review of Books in 2001, "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece."
Other writers were inspired by him, such as W.P. Kinsella, who made
Salinger a character in his 1999 novel "Shoeless Joe," and John Guare,
who paid homage to him in his 1990 hit play "Six Degrees of Separation."
Bestselling author Don DeLillo told Esquire magazine that "Mao II," his
1991 novel about a reclusive novelist, was born in the instant that he
noticed a tabloid photograph of Salinger with a haunted look on his
face.
Novelist Herbert Gold once asked Salinger for permission to reprint one
of his stories in an anthology. Salinger actually wrote back, Gold
recounted in the 2002 book "Letters to J.D. Salinger," edited by Chris
Kubica and Will Hochman. His answer, however, was no.
Gold lost the letter but 40 years later still remembered Salinger's
enigmatic last words on refusing a place in the anthology:
"I have my reasons."
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