American novelist and short story writer. Salinger published one novel and
several short story collections between 1948-59. His best-known work is THE
CATCHER IN THE RYE ( 1951), a story about a rebellious teenage schoolboy and
his quixotic experiences in New York.
J.D. Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment 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. When he was eighteen and nineteen, Salinger spent five
months in Europe in 1937. 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.
In 1939 Salinger took a class in short story writing at Columbia 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 meet in Paris
Ernest Hemingway. He was also involved in one of the bloodiest episodes of
the war in Hürtgenweald, an useless battle, where he witnessed the horrors
of war.
In his celebrated story 'For Esmé - With Love and Squalor' Salinger
depicted a fatigued American soldier. He starts 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 sour and he 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 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.
Salinger's early short stories appeared in such magazines as Story, where
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 appeared 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish', 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.
Twenty stories published in Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Good
Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and 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.
Salinger's first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, became immediately a Book-of-the-Month
Club selection and gained a huge international success. It sells still some
250 000 copies annually. Salinger did not do much to help publicity, and asked
that his photograph is not used in connection with the book.
First reviews of the work were mixed, although most critics 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. It tells about 16-year
old restless Caulfield - as Salinger in his youth - who 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 meets next day 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', is constantly in search of sincerity and represented the early
hero of adolescent angst.
Rumors spread from time to time, that Salinger will publish another novel,
or that he publishes his work under a pseudonym, perhaps such as Thomas Pynchon.
From 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 reveived a letter from the author, and after an intense
correspondence Maynard moved in with the author.
Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography of Salinger was rewritten, when the
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.
