J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment
In 1939 Salinger took a class in short story writing at Columbia
In his celebrated story 'For Esm� - With Love and Squalor' Salinger
Salinger's early short stories appeared in such magazines as Story, where
Twenty stories published in Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire,
Salinger's first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, became immediately a
The first reviews of the work were mixed, although most critics
From time to time rumors spread that Salinger will publish another novel,
Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography of Salinger was rewritten, when the
district of Manhattan, New York. He was the son of a prosperous
Jewish importer of Kosher cheese and his Scotch-Irish wife. In
his childhood the young Jerome was called Sonny. The family had a
beautiful apartment on Park Avenue. After restless studies in prep
schools, he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy (1934-36), which
he attended briefly. His friends from this period remember his sarcastic
wit. In 1937 when he was eighteen and nineteen, Salinger spent five
months in Europe. From 1937 to 1938 he studied at Ursinus College and
New York University. He fell in love with Oona O'Neill, wrote her letters
almost daily, and was later shocked when she married Charles Chaplin,
who
was much older than she.
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University under Whit Burnett, founder-editor of the Story Magazine.
During World War II he was drafted into the infantry and was involved
in the invasion of Normandy. Salinger's comrades considered him very brave,
a genuine hero. During the first months in Europe Salinger managed to write
stories and in Paris meet Ernest Hemingway. He was also involved in one
of the bloodiest episodes of the war in H�rtgenwald, a useless battle,
where he witnessed the horrors of war.
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depicted a fatigued American soldier. He starts a correspondence with
a thirteen-year-old British girl, which helps him to get a grip of life
again. Salinger himself was hospitalized for stress according to his
biographer Ian Hamilton. After serving in the Army Signal Corps and
Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1942 to 1946, he devoted himself to
writing. He played poker with other aspiring writers, but was considered
a sour character who won all the time. He considered Hemingway and
Steinbeck second rate writers but praised Melville. In 1945 Salinger
married a French woman named Sylvia - she was a doctor. They were later
divorced and in 1955 Salinger married Claire Douglas, the daughter of
the
British art critic Robert Langton Douglas. The marriage ended in divorce
in 1967, when Salinger's retreat into his private world and Zen Buddhism
only increased.
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his first story was published in 1940, Saturday Evening Post and Esquire,
and then in the New Yorker, which published almost all of his later texts.
In 1948 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' appeared, which introduced Seymour
Glass, who commits suicide. It was the earliest reference to the Glass
family, whose stories would go on to form the main corpus of his writing.
The 'Glass cycle' continued in the collections FRANNY AND ZOOEY (1961),
RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS (1963) and SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
(1963). Several of the stories are narrated by Buddy Glass. 'Hapworth 16,
1924' is written in the form of a letter from summer camp, in which the
seven-year-old Seymour draws a portrait of him and his younger brother
Buddy. "When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly
more original poets we've had in America, as well as the numerous talented
eccentric poets and - in modern times, especially - the many gifted style
deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have only three or
four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually
stand with those few." (from Seymour, An Introduction)
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Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and the New Yorker between 1941 and
1948 appeared in a pirated edition in 1974, THE COMPLETE UNCOLLECTED
STORIES OF J.D. SALINGER (2 vols.). Many of them reflect Salinger's own
service in the army. Later Salinger adopted Hindu-Buddhist influences. He
became an ardent devotee of The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, a study of
Hindu mysticism, which was translated into English by Swami Nikhilananda
and Joseph Campbell.
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Book-of-the-Month Club selection and won huge international acclaim.
to help publicity, and asked that his photograph should not be used in
connection with the book.
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considered it brilliant. The novel took its title from a line by Robert
Burns, in which the protagonist Holden Caulfied misquoting it sees
himself as a 'catcher in the rye' who must keep the world's children
from falling off 'some crazy cliff'. The story is written in a monologue
and in lively slang. The 16-year old restless hero - as Salinger was in
his youth - runs away from school during his Christmas break to New York
to find himself and lose his virginity. He spends an evening going to
nightclubs, has an unsuccessful encounter with a prostitute, and the next
day meets an old girlfriend. After getting drunk he sneaks home. Holden's
former schoolteacher makes homosexual advances to him. He meets his sister
to tell her that he is leaving home and has a nervous breakdown. The humor
of the novel places it in the tradition of Mark Twain's classical works,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but
its world-view is more disillusioned. Holden describes everything as 'phoney'
and is constantly in search of sincerity. Holden represents the early hero
of adolescent angst, but full of life, he is the great literary opposite
of Goethe's young Werther.
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or that he is publishing his work under a pseudonym, perhaps such as Thomas
Pynchon. "Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even
praise, I happily suspect.)," Salinger wrote in Seymour - An Introduction.
From the late 60's he has avoided publicity. Journalists have assumed, that
because he doesn't give interviews, he has something to hide. In 1961 Time
Magazine sent a team of reporters to investigate his private life. "I like
to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure,"
said Salinger in 1974 to a New York Times correspondent. However, according
to Joyce Maynard, who was close to the author for a long time from the 1970s,
Salinger still writes, but nobody is allowed to see the work.
Maynard was eighteen when she received a letter from the author, and after an
intense correspondence she moved in with him.
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author did not accept extensive quoting of his personal letters. The new
version, In Search of J.D. Salinger, appeared in 1988. In 1992 a fire broke
out in Salinger's Cornish house, but he managed to flee from the reporters
who saw an opportunity to interview him. Since the late 80s Salinger has
been married to Colleen O'Neill. Maynard's story of her relationship with
Salinger, At Home in the World, appeared in October 1998.
Plot
