J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger, in full Jerome David
Salinger (b. Jan. 1, 1919, New York,
N.Y., U.S.—d. Jan. 27, 2010, Cornish,
N.H.), American writer whose novel The
Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical
acclaim and devoted admirers, especially
among the post-World War II generation
of college students. His entire corpus
of published works consists of that one
novel and 13 short stories, all
originally written in the period
1948–59.
Salinger was the son of a Jewish father
and a Christian mother, and, like Holden
Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in
the Rye, he grew up in New York City,
attending public schools and a military
academy. After brief periods at New York
and Columbia universities, he devoted
himself entirely to writing, and his
stories began to appear in periodicals
in 1940. After his return from service
in the U.S. Army (1942–46), Salinger’s
name and writing style became
increasingly associated with The New
Yorker magazine, which published almost
all of his later stories. Some of the
best of these made use of his wartime
experiences: “For Esmé—With Love and
Squalor” (1950) describes a U.S.
soldier’s poignant encounter with two
British children; “A Perfect Day for
Bananafish” (1948) concerns the suicide
of the sensitive, despairing veteran
Seymour Glass.
Major critical and popular recognition
came with the publication of The Catcher
in the Rye, whose central character, a
sensitive, rebellious adolescent,
relates in authentic teenage idiom his
flight from the “phony” adult world, his
search for innocence and truth, and his
final collapse on a psychiatrist’s
couch. The humour and colourful language
of The Catcher in the Rye place it in
the tradition of Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn and the stories of
Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of
Salinger’s child characters, views his
life with an added dimension of
precocious self-consciousness. Nine
Stories (1953), a selection of
Salinger’s best work, added to his
reputation.
The reclusive habits of Salinger in his
later years made his personal life a
matter of speculation among devotees,
while his small literary output was a
subject of controversy among critics.
Franny and Zooey (1961) brought together
two earlier New Yorker stories; both
deal with the Glass family, as do the
two stories in Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction
(1963).
