J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91
Matthew Kruk
J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91 By CHARLES McGRATH
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 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."
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.
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 tens of
thousands of copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who
assassinated John Lennon in 1980, even said that 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 admired even more "Nine Stories," which came out in 1953
and helped shape later 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 for the way they demolished
whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story -
the old structure of beginning, middle, end - in favor of 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 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, N.H. 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 editor of The New Yorker.
Avoiding Mr. Shawn's usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin,
they would meet instead 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 at the last
minute backed out of the deal. 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.
In the fall of 1953 Mr. Salinger 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 (N.H.)
Daily Eagle. The story 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
following 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 your 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 Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out
that William Wharton was instead a pen name for a writer named 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 observers Mr. Salinger eventually won, though not without some cost
to his cherished privacy. (In June 2009 Mr. Salinger also sued Fredrik
Colting, the Swedish author and publisher of a novel said to be a sequel
to "The Catcher in the Rye.")
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. But 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 exotic 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 any real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn't written a
word for years. Or like the character in Stephen King's novel "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 up.
Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away
in a safe, although she had never seen them.
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 (the name, incidentally, of the wife
who drives Seymour Glass to suicide) 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.
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, near Wayne, Pa., which became the model for
Holden's Pencey Prep. Like Holden, he was the manager of the school
fencing team, and he also became the literary editor of the school
yearbook, Crossed Swords, and wrote a school song 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 way 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, Devonshire, the setting for "For Esm� - 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.
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
particularly 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 Mr. 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."
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 English 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 called "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 and the director of the Cornish town
fair, 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.
Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O'Neill; his son, Matt; his daughter,
Margaret and three grandsons. His literary agents said their 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 during his honeymoon.
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, in fact, 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
troubled, 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 wrote, 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, she said, which said as much about the world as about the kind of
people who failed to get along there.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Loki
wrote:
>January 29, 2010
>J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91 By CHARLES McGRATH
It is funny... I have admired most of his works that I have read,
except for some reason I never was able to embrace Catcher In The Rye.
Haven't picked it up since Chapman was reading it when he shot John
Lennon. Maybe it is time to give it another try.
Loki
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in
the flag and carrying a cross."
-Sinclair Lewis
so
> > It is funny... I have admired most of his works that I have read,
> > except for some reason I never was able to embrace Catcher In The Rye.
> > Haven't picked it up since Chapman was reading it when he shot John
> > Lennon.
>
>
Geez, I don't think it was Salinger's fault. Oswald drank a Coke after
shooting Kennedy and I still drink the stuff.
scott
rob cibik
his fear stems from the possibility of harm coming to albert pujols or
blow-up albert pujols while reading it.
BobF
[Default] On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:55:31 -0600, "A" <aa...@att.net>
magnanimously proffered:
>"Loki" <cubby...@aol.com> wrote in message
>news:kmp3m5hu398d8up23...@4ax.com...
>> On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:57:19 -0700, "Matthew Kruk" <nob...@home.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>January 29, 2010
>>>J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91 By CHARLES McGRATH
>>
>> It is funny... I have admired most of his works that I have read,
>> except for some reason I never was able to embrace Catcher In The Rye.
>> Haven't picked it up since Chapman was reading it when he shot John
>> Lennon.
>
> That is one good reason why I won't ever read it.
But the main reason is that it hasn't been made into a TV sit-com or a
Three Stooges movie.
********
Oh, yes it did. Just ask Col. Sherman T. Potter.
> Another one who cannot differentiate tv from the real world. No wonder you
> live in Saint Louis.
Just for that remark, I'm gonna sic Col. Potter on you! He only lives
about 100 mi. up the road from me in Hannibal, MO.
BTW, I hope you don't live anywhere near NYC or DC. I wouldn't want
anything bad to happen to you in the next terrorist strike.
Take care.
- From "The Sayings of Roy"
islanders
>
> > It is funny... I have admired most of his works that I have read,
> > except for some reason I never was able to embrace Catcher In The Rye.
> > Haven't picked it up since Chapman was reading it when he shot John
> > Lennon.
>
>
The other good reason is that you cannot read.
AndrewJ
> And yet the more he sought privacy the more famous he became
All right, with Salinger's death who's the world's most famous recluse
now? Thomas Pynchon? Sandy Koufax?
Alan Ramsey
All right, with Salinger's death who's the world's most famous recluse
now? Thomas Pynchon? Sandy Koufax?
Well, Pynchon has made a couple of "appearances"
on the Simpsons, though his cartoon image wears
a paper bag over his head, with a question mark on it.
Michael O'Connor
adapted into the movie Field of Dreams. In the movie, James Earl
Jones played the reclusive author, but in the book J.D. Salinger was
the reclusive author who takes a cross country trip with Ray Kinsella
to Iowa. I don't remember if Salinger approved his appearance in the
book, but I think he would have had to allow it because the author
W.P. Kinsella would have gotten the pants sued off him.
BobF
[Default] On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:29:11 -0800 (PST), AndrewJ
<ajmi...@cavtel.net> magnanimously proffered:
>
>> And yet the more he sought privacy the more famous he became
>
>All right, with Salinger's death who's the world's most famous recluse
>now? Thomas Pynchon? Sandy Koufax?
Roy's Albert Pujols blow-up doll?
--
"Question: Why doesn't PyrateJohn wear a helmet?
Answer: He has nothing left to lose since his brains are long gone,
despite having a physical skull."
AndrewJ
Phil Alden Robinson, who adapted SHOELESS JOE into the FIELD OF DREAMS
screenplay, has said that he changed Salinger into Jones's character
(named Terrence Mann, IIRC) because he was afraid that if Salinger's
name was used without permission, Salinger would wait until filming
was completed before suing the studio and probably kiboshing its
release.
Loki
Harper Lee is another.
Trol...@invalid.invalid.com
[Default] On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:03:15 -0600, "A" <aa...@att.net>
magnanimously proffered:
>
>"rob cibik" <lcp...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>news:fac8f244-53ed-49f8...@m31g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
> You finally did it: you pushed me over the edge.
> I decided to ignore your fantasy-obsessions.
> You aren't worth reading anything and you only repeat the same
>garbage as your only postings.
> I'm not reading *any* of your posts from now on.
> I hope this makes you happy.
> Have fun, creep-sickie.
Coward.
--
Every village has an idiot and Roy is our's:
"BTW, there are many lurkers who will agree with me."
"There are hundreds of millions of people using Usenet around the world.
Just because YOU don't know their names doesn't mean they don't use it."
"I have plenty of friends on Facebook."
"I guess you NZ/AU people don't have to worry about having any ski
accidents."
"The problem with you crazies is you listen to your own voice too
much and have fallen in love with yourselves. Take a break from what
O'Reilly/Coulter may spew out, and start reading freedom-and
libertarian-oriented books and blogs instead of fellow dummies as are
O'Reilly/Coulter/Olbermann/Mathews and other collectivist-warriors on the
phony Left-Right line which signifies nothing. You even identify with
Stalin (as was Hitler) as a collectivist of the worst in ordering
concentration camps for those who don't believe in their worldview of the
State-uber-alles."
"What age did you first start reading the morning newspaper
and comprehending large words, SEVEN? Beat you by at least three years;
and an aunt of mine told me it was *before* I was yet FOUR! Meow!"
"BTW, I missed being a MENSA member by *thismuch* on the IQ level."
"I was born with the defect." - Roy "A" Lieberman
Loki
>x-no-archive: yes
>
>"Alan Ramsey" <alanr...@windstream.net> wrote in message
>news:e88e6$4b623ad9$97d5cf04$13...@ALLTEL.NET...
>>
>> All right, with Salinger's death who's the world's most famous recluse
>> now? Thomas Pynchon? Sandy Koufax?
>
> That's interesting you mention Koufax.
> He doesn't seem to make many (any?) public appearances AFAIK.
> He does seem very reclusive compared to other retired famous athletes.
> Stan Musial (age 88) makes more public appearances in a year than
>74-yr-old Koufax.
Until a couple of years ago, Koufax made fairly regular appearances at
Dodger spring training in Florida. And every 5 years or so he would
make a statement in which he would deny having grown up with Larry
King.
folkmusic
> Until a couple of years ago, Koufax made fairly regular appearances at
> Dodger spring training in Florida. And every 5 years or so he would
> make a statement in which he would deny having grown up with Larry
> King.
Koufax is scheduled to make a rare public appearance on Feb. 27 in
Los Angeles at the Nokia Theater, benefiting Joe Torre's anti-
domestic
abuse foundation Safe at Home.
AndrewJ
Actually, Koufax *has* been showing up to the Baseball Hall of Fame
inductions in Cooperstown pretty regularly over the past decade. But
we haven't exactly been inundated with lengthier public appearances
from him, either.
rob cibik
yet you still live on to write.
> I decided to ignore your fantasy-obsessions.
yet you mention my name elsewhere in this group after writing this.
> You aren't worth reading anything and you only repeat the same
> garbage as your only postings.
again, my postings to and about you are pretty much the exception. as
for repeating 'the same garbage as your only postings' you are not
only incorrect but guilty of it yourself. of course, since most of
your posts are not archived i'll rely on the various volumes of 'the
sayings of roy' and current posts to speak for me.
> I'm not reading *any* of your posts from now on.
i'll double-up on my anti-depressants today.
> I hope this makes you happy.
i only want you to be happy, roy.
> Have fun, creep-sickie.
again with the name-calling.
> Have fun, creep-sickie.
Lenona
8. It was the old Signet paperback edition, which says on the cover:
"This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break
your heart–but you will never forget it."
Sounded pretty scary to me at the time. I didn't read it until my
teens.
You can see that one plus three other edition covers here:
http://stickersanddonuts.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/catcher-in-the-rye-covers.jpg
There are at least two others - the plain red cover and the Penguin
edition.
Lenona.
B. R. Slim
marcus
"The Catcher In The Rye" is of the two most influential books I read
in my early teens...the other one being "Slaughterhouse 5". Both
tapped into my alienation from the "phonies", and greatly influenced
my adult writing style.
BobF
[Default] On Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:19:43 -0800 (PST), marcus
<marc...@yahoo.com> magnanimously proffered:
>tapped into my alienation from the "phonies" ...
It sounds a bit ambitious, I know ... but I'm hoping to achieve
something similar with "The Sayings of Roy."
--
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Loki
With me it was "Slaughterhouse 5" and "Catch 22".
Loki
Time Magazine Man Of The Year 1966 & 2006
Turban Joe Balasootoe
Our friend "A" cannot think.
There was a time when we thought "Catcher" dealt
with the 'basic issues'. Then we read about the:
baby seal slaughters
the furriers and their "farmers"
the vivisectors
100 others.
After that we had to drink and d*** because we
knew we could never eradicate the slime. Lit-ra-
ture became something for the 'Haughty Elite'.
R H Draney
>>in my early teens...the other one being "Slaughterhouse 5". Both
>>tapped into my alienation from the "phonies", and greatly influenced
>>my adult writing style.
>
>With me it was "Slaughterhouse 5" and "Catch 22".
"Naked Lunch" and "The House at Pooh Corner"....r
--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?
Brad Ferguson
<b...@surfwriter.net.not> wrote:
> It sounds a bit ambitious, I know ... but I'm hoping to achieve
> something similar with "The Sayings of Roy."
The Catcher in the Roy?
rob cibik
> In article <7shrmqFgo...@mid.individual.net>, BobF
The 1st Baseman in Roy"
Matthew Kruk
---
Roy in the 1st Baseman ;-)
Bill Schenley
> > but I'm hoping to achieve something
> > similar with "The Sayings of Roy."
>
> The Catcher in the Roy?
A Catcher, Is the Roy?
rob cibik
>
> > > It sounds a bit ambitious, I know ... but I'm hoping to achieve
> > > something similar with "The Sayings of Roy."
>
> > The Catcher in the Roy?
>
> The 1st Baseman in Roy"
>
they're switch hitters.
Matthew Kruk
news:7secn6...@mid.individual.net...
>
> [Default] On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:55:31 -0600, "A" <aa...@att.net>
> magnanimously proffered:
>
>>"Loki" <cubby...@aol.com> wrote in message
>>news:kmp3m5hu398d8up23...@4ax.com...
>>> On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:57:19 -0700, "Matthew Kruk" <nob...@home.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>January 29, 2010
>>>>J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91 By CHARLES McGRATH
>>>
>>> except for some reason I never was able to embrace Catcher In The
>>> Rye.
>>> Haven't picked it up since Chapman was reading it when he shot John
>>> Lennon.
>>
>> That is one good reason why I won't ever read it.
>
> Three Stooges movie.
Talk about weird newgroup stuff - this response just again reappeared on
my server.