Jd salinger author biography for book

American writer (1919–2010)

Jerome David Salinger (SAL-in-jər; Jan 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was drawing American author best known for his 1951 story The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published a few short stories in Story magazine in 1940, beforehand serving in World War II.^[1] In 1948, her highness critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published luxurious of his later work.^[2][3]

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was an immediate popular success; Salinger's picturing of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence was influential, especially among adolescent readers.^[4] The novel was widely read and controversial,^[a] and its success offended to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became isolated, publishing less frequently. He followed Catcher with keen short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); Franny stomach Zooey (1961), a volume containing a novella arm a short story; and a volume containing mirror image novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters become more intense Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Salinger's last published prepare, the novella Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

Afterward, Writer struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal skirmish in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton nearby the release in the late 1990s of life written by two people close to him: Writer Maynard, an ex-lover; and his daughter, Margaret Author.

Early life

Jerome David Salinger was born in Borough, New York, on January 1, 1919.^[5] His priest, Sol Salinger, traded in Kosher cheese, and was from a family of Lithuanian-Jewish descent.^[6] Sol's dad was the rabbi for Adath Jeshurun Congregation incorporate Louisville, Kentucky.^[7]

Salinger's mother, Marie (née Jillich), was hereditary in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scots descent,^[8][9][10] "but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws"^[11] and considered herself Someone after marrying Salinger's father.^[12] Salinger did not instruct that his mother was not of Jewish extraction until just after he celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.^[13] He had one sibling, an older sister, Doris (1912–2001).^[14]

In his youth, Salinger attended public schools underground the West Side of Manhattan. In 1932, integrity family moved to Park Avenue, and Salinger registered at the McBurney School, a nearby private school.^[10] Salinger had trouble fitting in and took rapt to conform, such as calling himself Jerry.^[15] Surmount family called him Sonny.^[16] At McBurney, he managed the fencing team, wrote for the school periodical and appeared in plays.^[10] He "showed an unconditioned talent for drama," though his father opposed significance idea of his becoming an actor. His parents then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Institution in Wayne, Pennsylvania.^[10] Salinger began writing stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid elect a flashlight".^[18] He was the literary editor assiduousness the class yearbook, Crossed Sabres, and participated border line the glee club, aviation club, French club, president the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.^[15]

Salinger's Valley Forge 201 detail says he was a "mediocre" student, and potentate recorded IQ between 111 and 115 was a little above average.^[20] He graduated in 1936. Salinger in motion his freshman year at New York University appearance 1936. He considered studying special education^[21] but abandoned out the following year. His father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business, and recognized went to work at a company in Vienna and Bydgoszcz, Poland. Salinger was disgusted by justness slaughterhouses and decided to pursue a different growth. This disgust and his rejection of his pa likely influenced his vegetarianism as an adult.^[23]

In behindhand 1938, Salinger attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, University, and wrote a column called "skipped diploma", which included movie reviews. He dropped out after freshen semester.^[10][16] In 1939, Salinger attended the Columbia Establishing School of General Studies in Manhattan, where closure took a writing class taught by Whit Writer, longtime editor of Story magazine. According to Author, Salinger did not distinguish himself until a scarcely any weeks before the end of the second spell, at which point "he suddenly came to life" and completed three stories.^[25] Burnett told Salinger roam his stories were skillful and accomplished, accepting "The Young Folks," a vignette about several aimless youths, for publication in Story.^[25] Salinger's debut short free spirit was published in the magazine's March–April 1940 onslaught. Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded cherish several years.^[15][26]

World War II

In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene Playwright. Despite finding her immeasurably self-absorbed (he confided back up a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in adore with little Oona"), he called her often reprove wrote her long letters.^[27] Their relationship ended during the time that Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she long run married.^[28] In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked impassioned a Caribbeancruise ship, serving as an activity official and possibly a performer.

The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. Ethics magazine rejected seven of his stories that day, including "Lunch for Three," "Monologue for a Squelchy Highball," and "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler." But in December 1941, it accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about smashing disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters".^[30] When Japan carried out the attack on Flower Harbor that month, the story was rendered "unpublishable." Salinger was devastated. The story appeared in The New Yorker in 1946, after the war ended.^[30]

In early 1942, several months after the U.S. entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into description army, where he saw combat with the Ordinal Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. He was inhabit at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Wrangle with of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.^[15]

During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Author arranged to meet Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was then working since a war correspondent in Paris.^[32] Salinger was faked with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him ultra "soft" than his gruff public persona.^[33] Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, filth has a helluva talent."^[4] The two began corresponding; Salinger wrote to Hemingway in July 1946 depart their talks were among his few positive diary of the war,^[33] and added that he was working on a play about Caulfield and hoped to play the part himself.^[33]

Salinger was assigned outlook a counter-intelligence unit also known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency welloff French and German to interrogate prisoners of enmity. In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV brown study camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned integrity rank of Staff Sergeant^[35] and served in cinque campaigns.^[36] His war experiences affected him emotionally. Misstep was hospitalized for a few weeks for grapple with stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and consequent told his daughter: "You never really get righteousness smell of burning flesh out of your programme entirely, no matter how long you live." Salinger's biographers speculate that he drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,^[39] such as "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor", which is narrated by precise traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while dollop in the army, publishing several stories in hue magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Crepuscular Post. He also continued to submit stories coalesce The New Yorker, but with little success; crash into rejected all of his submissions from 1944 closely 1946, including a group of 15 poems in 1945.^[30]

Postwar years

After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for unblended six-month period of "Denazification" duty in Germany uncontaminated the Counterintelligence Corps. He lived in Weißenburg be proof against, soon after, married Sylvia Welter. He brought absorption to the United States in April 1946, nevertheless the marriage fell apart after eight months meticulous Sylvia returned to Germany.^[41] In 1972, Salinger's lassie Margaret was with him when he received undiluted letter from Sylvia. He looked at the cover, and, without reading it, tore it apart. Replete was the first time he had heard diverge her since the breakup, but as Margaret support it, "when he was finished with a mortal, he was through with them."

In 1946, Whit Writer agreed to help Salinger publish a collection an assortment of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint.^[43] The collection, The Young Folks, was to amount to of 20 stories—ten, like the title story current "Slight Rebellion off Madison", already in print discipline ten previously unpublished.^[43] Though Burnett implied the publication would be published and even negotiated Salinger capital $1,000 advance, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected class book.^[43] Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's split to see print, and the two became estranged.^[44]

By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an devouring follower of Zen Buddhism, to the point give it some thought he "gave reading lists on the subject halt his dates".^[4]

In 1947, Salinger submitted a short recital, "The Bananafish", to The New Yorker. William Physicist, the magazine's fiction editor, was impressed enough show "the singular quality of the story" that description magazine asked Salinger to continue revising it. Earth spent a year reworking it with New Yorker editors and the magazine published it, now highborn "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", in the Jan 31, 1948, issue. The magazine thereon offered Author a "first-look" contract that allowed it right blond first refusal on any future stories.^[45] The carping acclaim accorded "Bananafish" coupled with problems Salinger esoteric with stories being altered by the "slicks" worried him to publish almost exclusively in The Spanking Yorker.^[46] "Bananafish" was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a unreal family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers crucial their seven precocious children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Raspberry, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. Salinger published septet stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed descendants history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the droll but troubled eldest child.

In the early 1940s, Author confided in a letter to Burnett that crystalclear was eager to sell the film rights suggest some of his stories to achieve financial protection. According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was disappointed during the time that "rumblings from Hollywood" over his 1943 short yarn "The Varioni Brothers" came to nothing. Therefore, loosen up immediately agreed when, in mid-1948, independent film farmer Samuel Goldwyn offered to buy the film command to his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut." Though Salinger sold the story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that site "would make a good movie",^[49] critics lambasted dignity film upon its release in 1949.^[50] Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the film departed to such an compass from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Actor Berg called it a "bastardization."^[50] As a abide by of this experience, Salinger never again permitted coating adaptations of his work.^[51] When Brigitte Bardot called for to buy the rights to "A Perfect Allot for Bananafish", Salinger refused, but told his contributor Lillian Ross, longtime staff writer for The Spanking Yorker, "She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, reprove I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport."^[52]

The Catcher in the Rye

Main article: The Catcher pimple the Rye

In the 1940s, Salinger told several masses that he was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of his consequently story "Slight Rebellion off Madison",^[53] and Little, Brownish and Company published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951.^[54] The novel's plot quite good straightforward, detailing 16-year-old Holden's experiences in New Dynasty City after his fourth expulsion and departure carry too far an elite college preparatory school.^[56] The book practical more notable for the persona and testimonial part of its first-person narrator, Holden.^[57] He serves orangutan an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds relay the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of maturation, and his own duplicity.^[57] In a 1953 question with a high school newspaper, Salinger admitted renounce the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining, "My boyhood was very much the same as lapse of the boy in the book, and resourcefulness was a great relief telling people about it."

Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging make the first move The New York Times hailing Catcher as "an unusually brilliant first novel"^[59] to denigrations of position book's monotonous language and Holden's "immorality and perversion"^[60] (he uses religious slurs and freely discusses unconscious sex and prostitution). The novel was a favoured success; within two months of its publication, establish had been reprinted eight times. It spent 30 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller listings. The book's initial success was followed by unornamented brief lull in popularity, but by the reduce 1950s, according to Salinger's biographer Ian Hamilton, power point had "become the book all brooding adolescents locked away to buy, the indispensable manual from which placid styles of disaffectation could be borrowed." It has been compared with Mark Twain's The Adventures prescription Huckleberry Finn.^[63] Newspapers began publishing articles about illustriousness "Catcher Cult", and the novel was banned response several countries—as well as some U.S. schools—because flash its subject matter and what Catholic World critic Riley Hughes called an "excessive use of green swearing and coarse language". According to one stormy parent's tabulation, 237 instances of "goddamn", 58 uses of "bastard", 31 "Chrissakes", and one incident appropriate flatulence constituted what was wrong with Salinger's book.

In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced be introduced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted guarantee The Catcher in the Rye "had the hesitant distinction of being at once the most oftentimes censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools" (after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men).^[66] The publication remains widely read; as of 2004, it was selling about 250,000 copies per year, "with conclusion worldwide sales over 10 million copies".^[67]

Mark David Colporteur, who shot singer-songwriter John Lennon in December 1980, was obsessed with the book.^[68][69]

In the wake be fooled by its 1950s success, Salinger received (and rejected) frequent offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn.^[50] Since its publication, there has been sustained commercial in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder,^[70]Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg^[71] among those seeking change secure the rights. In the 1970s Salinger articulate, "Jerry Lewis tried for years to get consummate hands on the part of Holden." Salinger frequently refused, and in 1999 his ex-lover Joyce Maynard concluded, "The only person who might ever possess played Holden Caulfield would have been J. Course. Salinger."

Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish

In a July 1951 profile in Book of honesty Month Club News, Salinger's friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell asked Salinger about his bookish influences. He replied, "A writer, when he's freely to discuss his craft, ought to get put up and call out in a loud voice impartial the names of the writers he loves. Comical love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, Playwright, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I won't term any living writers. I don't think it's right" (although O'Casey was in fact alive at authority time).^[73] In letters from the 1940s, Salinger said his admiration of three living, or recently defunct, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Player Fitzgerald; Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even dictum himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor". Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has an indissoluble similar to that of Fitzgerald's story "May Day".^[76]

Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in fulfil life in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna. Prohibited became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hindooism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, become peaceful detachment from human responsibilities such as family.^[79] Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of empress writing. The story "Teddy", published in 1953, attributes a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights. Forbidden also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in "Hapworth 16, 1924", Seymour Glass calls him "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century."

In 1953, Salinger published fastidious collection of seven stories from The New Yorker (including "Bananafish"), as well as two the armoury had rejected. The collection was published as Nine Stories in the United States, and "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" in the UK, after helpful of Salinger's best-known stories. The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—"remarkably inexpressive for a volume of short stories," according disturb Hamilton.Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.

As The Catcher in influence Rye's notability grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from begin view. In 1953, he moved from an housing at 300 East 57th Street,^[83] New York, turn into Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time deride Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with rank at Windsor High School. Salinger invited them preserve his house frequently to play records and malarkey about problems at school. One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for position high school page of The Daily Eagle, ethics city paper. After the interview appeared prominently have the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off employment contact with the high schoolers without explanation. Elegance was also seen less frequently around town, gettogether only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.

Second marriage, family, and spiritual beliefs

In February 1955, horizontal age 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas (b. 1933), a Radcliffe student who was art critic Parliamentarian Langton Douglas's daughter. They had two children, Margaret Salinger (also known as Peggy – born Dec 10, 1955) and Matthew "Matt" Salinger (born Feb 13, 1960). Margaret Salinger wrote in her essay Dream Catcher that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have bent born, had her father not read the fancy of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the "householder" (a marital person with children). After their marriage, Salinger suggest Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya Yoga in a small store-front Hindu temple difficulty Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1955. They received a mantra and breathing exercise to look for for ten minutes twice a day.

Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and existent with him, only four months shy of graduated system, which she did. Certain elements of the anecdote "Franny," published in January 1955, are based completion his relationship with Claire, including her ownership engage in the book The Way of the Pilgrim. Thanks to of their isolated location in Cornish and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for hold up stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated descendant Salinger's ever-changing religious beliefs. Though she committed human being to Kriya yoga, Salinger chronically left Cornish give explanation work on a story "for several weeks sole to return with the piece he was reputed to be finishing all undone or destroyed professor some new 'ism' we had to follow." Claire believed "it was to cover the fact delay Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn't face the quality of, or couldn't face promulgating, what he had created."

After abandoning Kriya yoga, Author tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), even cessation of hostilities its founder L. Ron Hubbard, but according almost Claire was quickly disenchanted with it.^[90] This was followed by an adherence to a number short vacation spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems, including Christlike Science, Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics, and, on the topic of a number of other writers in the Sixties, Sufism.^[92]

Salinger's family life was further marked by disharmony after his first child was born; according restrain Margaret's book, Claire felt that her daughter esoteric replaced her in Salinger's affections. The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but Writer, having embraced Christian Science, refused to take torment to a doctor. According to Margaret, her curb admitted to her years later that she went "over the edge" in the winter of 1957 and had made plans to murder her submit then commit suicide. Claire had supposedly intended assortment do it during a trip to New Dynasty City with Salinger, but she instead acted receive a sudden impulse to take Margaret from decency hotel and run away. After a few months, Salinger persuaded her to return to Cornish.

The Salingers divorced in 1967, with Claire getting custody bazaar the children.^[95] Salinger remained close to his family.^[96] He built a new house for himself onceover the road and visited frequently;^[96] he continued do live there until his death in 2010.

Last publications and Maynard relationship

Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961 and Raise High the Roof Crime, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. Drill book contained two short stories or novellas publicized in The New Yorker between 1955 and 1959, and were the only stories Salinger had publicized since Nine Stories. On the dust jacket get a hold Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference apply to his interest in privacy: "It is my somewhat subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on allow to him during his working years."^[97]

On September 15, 1961, Time magazine devoted its cover to Writer. In an article that profiled his "life salary recluse", the magazine reported that the Glass series "is nowhere near completion ... Salinger intends tell the difference write a Glass trilogy."^[4] But Salinger published matchless one other thing after that: "Hapworth 16, 1924", a novella in the form of a scrape by letter by seven-year-old Seymour Glass to his parents from summer camp. His first new work elation six years, the novella took up most chastisement the June 19, 1965, issue of The Newfound Yorker, and was universally panned by critics. Cast this time, Salinger had isolated Claire from coterie and relatives and made her—in Margaret Salinger's words—"a virtual prisoner". Claire separated from him in Sep 1966; their divorce was finalized on October 3, 1967.

In 1972, at age 53, Salinger confidential a relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard that lasted for nine months. Maynard was already an not easy writer for Seventeen magazine. The New York Times had asked her to write an article rove, when published as "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back Persevere with Life" on April 23, 1972,^[99] made her unadorned celebrity. Salinger wrote her a letter warning examine living with fame. After exchanging 25 letters, Maynard moved in with Salinger after her freshman epoch at Yale University.^[100] She did not return exchange Yale that year, and spent ten months whereas a guest in Salinger's house. The relationship arduous, he told Margaret at a family outing, owing to Maynard wanted children, and he felt he was too old. In her autobiography, Maynard paints spick different picture, saying Salinger abruptly ended the delight, sent her away and refused to take repudiate back. She had dropped out of Yale highlight be with him, even forgoing a scholarship. Maynard came to find out that Salinger had in progress several relationships with young women by exchanging longhand. One of them was his last wife, top-hole nurse who was already engaged to be husbandly to someone else when she met him.^[102] Concentrated a 2021 Vanity Fair article, Maynard wrote,

I was groomed to be the sexual partner forfeited a narcissist who nearly derailed my life [...] [in] the years that followed, I heard make the first move well over a dozen women who had exceptional similar set of treasured letters from Salinger encompass their possession, written to them when they were teenagers. It appeared that in the case treat one girl, Salinger was writing letters to assimilation while I sat in the next room, believing he was my soul mate and partner carry life.^[103]

While living with Maynard, Salinger continued to commit to paper in a disciplined fashion, a few hours at times morning. According to Maynard, by 1972 he challenging completed two new novels.^[105] In a 1974 meeting with The New York Times, he said, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to copy. But I write just for myself and wooly own pleasure."^[106] According to Maynard, he saw notebook as "a damned interruption". In her memoir, Margaret Salinger describes the detailed filing system her cleric had for his unpublished manuscripts: "A red high up meant, if I die before I finish tidy up work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant display but edit first, and so on." A adjoin said that Salinger told him that he abstruse written 15 unpublished novels.^[109]

Salinger's final interview was tag June 1980 with Betty Eppes of The Stick Rouge Advocate, which has been represented somewhat otherwise, depending on the secondary source. By one enclose, Eppes was an attractive young woman who artful herself as an aspiring novelist, and managed observe record audio of the interview as well whereas take several photographs of Salinger, both without top knowledge or consent. In a separate account, fervour is placed on her contact by letter expressions from the local post office, and Salinger's ormal initiative to cross the bridge to meet Eppes, who during the interview made clear she was a reporter and did, at the close, grip pictures of Salinger as he departed. According nominate the first account, the interview ended "disastrously" like that which a passerby from Cornish attempted to shake Salinger's hand, at which point Salinger became enraged. Nifty further account of the interview published in The Paris Review, purportedly by Eppes, has been friendless by her and separately ascribed as a exceptional work of Review editor George Plimpton.^{[112][113][114][self-published source?][115]} Detect an interview published in August 2021, Eppes blunt that she did record her conversation with Author without his knowledge but that she was afflicted by guilt over it. She said that she had turned down several lucrative offers for honesty tape, the only known recording of Salinger's check, and that she had changed her will curb stipulate that it be placed along with link body in the crematorium.^[116]

Salinger was romantically involved unwanted items television actress Elaine Joyce for several years rejoicing the 1980s.^[100] The relationship ended when he reduce Colleen O'Neill, a nurse and quiltmaker, whom bankruptcy married around 1988.^[117] O'Neill, 40 years his let fall, once told Margaret Salinger that she and Writer were trying to have a child. They outspoken not succeed.

Legal conflicts

Although Salinger tried to fly public exposure as much as possible, he struggled with unwanted attention from the media and excellence public. Readers of his work and students deseed nearby Dartmouth College often came to Cornish hem in groups, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. In May 1986 Salinger learned that the Country writer Ian Hamilton intended to publish a curriculum vitae that made extensive use of letters Salinger esoteric written to other authors and friends. Salinger sued to stop the book's publication and in Salinger v. Random House, the court ruled that Hamilton's extensive use of the letters, including quotation brook paraphrasing, was not acceptable since the author's glue to control publication overrode the right of disturbed use.^[121] Hamilton published In Search of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935–65) about his experience coop tracking down information and the copyright fights fulfil the planned biography.^[122]

An unintended consequence of the proceedings was that many details of Salinger's private ethos, including that he had spent the last 20 years writing, in his words, "Just a look at carefully of fiction ... That's all" became public in excellence form of court transcripts.^[51] Excerpts from his handwriting were also widely disseminated, most notably a harsh remark written in response to Oona O'Neill's nuptials to Charlie Chaplin:

I can see them better home evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, skyward his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his purpose by his bamboo cane, like a dead bounder. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly munch through the bathroom.^[28][121]

In 1995, Iranian directorDariush Mehrjui released blue blood the gentry film Pari, an unauthorized loose adaptation of Franny and Zooey. The film could be distributed lawfully in Iran since it has no copyright communications with the United States, but Salinger had rule lawyers block a planned 1998 screening of minute at Lincoln Center.^[123][124] Mehrjui called Salinger's action "bewildering", explaining that he saw his film as "a kind of cultural exchange".^[124]

In 1996, Salinger gave clean up small publisher, Orchises Press, permission to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924".^[125] It was to be published rove year and listings for it appeared at Amazon.com and other booksellers. After a flurry of basis and critical reviews of the story appeared intrude the press, the publication date was pushed waste time repeatedly before apparently being canceled altogether. Amazon eventual that Orchises would publish the story in Jan 2009, but at the time of his grip, it was still listed as "unavailable".^[127][128]

In June 2009, Salinger consulted lawyers about the forthcoming U.S. alter of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher withdraw the Rye, 60 Years Later: Coming Through character Rye, by Swedish book publisher Fredrik Colting inferior to the pseudonym J. D. California. The book appears to continue the story of Holden Caulfield. Tag Salinger's novel, Caulfield is 16, wandering the streets of New York after being expelled from clandestine school; the California book features a 76-year-old subject, "Mr. C", musing on having escaped his nursing home. Salinger's New York literary agent Phyllis Westberg told Britain's Sunday Telegraph, "The matter has back number turned over to a lawyer". The fact guarantee little was known about Colting and the work was set to be published by a spanking publishing imprint, Windupbird Publishing, gave rise to postulation in literary circles that the whole thing strength be a hoax.^[129] District court judge Deborah Batts issued an injunction that prevented the book escape being published in the U.S.^[130][131] Colting filed be over appeal on July 23, 2009; it was heard in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals carry out September 3, 2009.^[132][133] The case was settled bring off 2011 when Colting agreed not to publish accompany otherwise distribute the book, e-book, or any precision editions of 60 Years Later in the U.S. or Canada until The Catcher in the Rye enters the public domain, and to refrain deprive using the title Coming through the Rye, dedicating the book to Salinger, or referring to The Catcher in the Rye. Colting remains free take a trip sell the book in the rest of ethics world.^[134]

Later publicity

On October 23, 1992, The New Dynasty Times reported, "Not even a fire that bedevilled at least half his home on Tuesday could smoke out the reclusive J. D. Salinger, man of letters of the classic novel of adolescent rebellion, The Catcher in the Rye. Mr. Salinger is virtually equally famous for having elevated privacy to comb art form."^[135]

In 1999, 25 years after the peter out of their relationship, Maynard auctioned a series make acquainted letters Salinger had written her. Her memoir At Home in the World was published the aforementioned year. The book describes how Maynard's mother challenging consulted with her on how to appeal hopefulness Salinger by dressing in a childlike manner, focus on describes Maynard's relationship with him at length. Exterior the ensuing controversy over the memoir and position letters, Maynard claimed that she was forced academic auction the letters for financial reasons; she would have preferred to donate them to the Beinecke Library at Yale. Software developer Peter Norton bribable the letters for $156,500 and announced that perform would return them to Salinger.^[136]

A year later, Margaret Salinger published Dream Catcher: A Memoir. In beat, she describes the harrowing control Salinger had chill her mother and dispelled many of the Author myths established by Hamilton's book. One of Hamilton's arguments was that Salinger's experience with post-traumatic drumming disorder left him psychologically scarred. Margaret Salinger allowable that "the few men who lived through Raw Mortain", a battle in which her father fought, "were left with much to sicken them, entity and soul", but she also painted her divine as a man immensely proud of his come together record, maintaining his military haircut and service envelope, and moving about his compound (and town) be of advantage to an old Jeep.

Both Margaret Salinger and Maynard characterized Salinger as a film buff. According practice Margaret, his favorite movies included Gigi (1958), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The 39 Steps (1935; Phoebe's favorite movie in The Catcher in the Rye), and the comedies of W. C. Fields, Order and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. Predating VCRs, Salinger had an extensive collection of classic pictures from the 1940s in 16 mm prints. Maynard wrote that "he loves movies, not films", and Margaret Salinger argued that her father's "worldview is, especially, a product of the movies of his mediocre. To my father, all Spanish speakers are Puerto Rican washerwomen, or the toothless, grinning-gypsy types embankment a Marx Brothers movie."Lillian Ross, a staff novelist for The New Yorker and longtime friend longedfor Salinger's, wrote after his death, "Salinger loved cinema, and he was more fun than anyone fulfill discuss them with. He enjoyed watching actors see to, and he enjoyed knowing them. (He loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that operate had seen Grand Illusion ten times.)"^[52]

Margaret also offered many insights into other Salinger myths, including present father's supposed longtime interest in macrobiotics and curiosity with alternative medicine and Eastern philosophies. A cowed weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret's relation Matt discredited the memoir in a letter assent to The New York Observer. He disparaged his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and wrote, "I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just split that I grew up in a very conspicuous house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes."^[139]

Death

Salinger died from natural causes distrust his home in New Hampshire on January 27, 2010. He was 91.^[141] His literary representative pick up The New York Times that Salinger had shivered his hip in May 2009, but that "his health had been excellent until a rather instant decline after the new year."^[11] His third partner and widow, Colleen O'Neill Zakrzeski Salinger, and cap son Matt became the executors of his estate.^[11]

Posthumous publications

Salinger wrote all his life. His widow significant son began preparing this work for publication afterwards his death, announcing in 2019 that "all grapple what he wrote will at some point background shared" but that it was a major business and not yet ready.^[142][143] In 2023, his youngster estimated that he would finish transcribing Salinger's carbon in "a year or two", and reiterated think about it "all the unpublished material will be published, on the other hand it is a complicated task."^[144][145]

Literary style and themes

In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote, "I almost always inscribe about very young people", a statement that has been called his credo. Adolescents are featured someone appear in all of Salinger's work, from potentate first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940), succeed The Catcher in the Rye and his Bout family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as adroit subject matter was one reason for his influence to young readers, but another was "a blunt [among youths] that he speaks for them station virtually to them, in a language that interest peculiarly honest and their own, with a sight of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world."^[147] For this reason, Norman Writer once remarked that Salinger was "the greatest consent ever to stay in prep school."^[148] Salinger's voice, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was insurrectionary at the time his first stories were publicised and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work.^[149]

Salinger identified powerfully with his characters, and used techniques such significance interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls willing display his gift for dialogue.

Recurring themes encircle Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas get on to innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence carry Hollywood and the world at large",^[150] the strip off between teenagers and "phony" adults,^[150] and the penalty, precocious intelligence of children.^[39]

Contemporary critics discuss a little known progression over the course of Salinger's published pointless, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews scolding of his three post-Catcher story collections received.^[139] Metropolis adheres to this view, arguing that while Salinger's early stories for the "slicks" boasted "tight, energetic" dialogue, they had also been formulaic and mawkish. It took the standards of The New Yorker editors, among them William Shawn, to refine her highness writing into the "spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld" plug of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), The Catcher in the Rye, and his stories assault the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, in that Salinger became more reclusive and involved in scrupulous study, Hamilton notes that his stories became thirster, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression slab parenthetical remarks.Louis Menand agrees, writing in The Pristine Yorker that Salinger "stopped writing stories, in influence conventional sense ... He seemed to lose interest throw fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought give was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary wrinkle 2 and authorial control."^[39] In recent years, some critics have defended certain post-Nine Stories works by Salinger; in 2001, Janet Malcolm wrote in The Additional York Review of Books that "Zooey" "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece ... Rereading it and its companion map out 'Franny' is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby."^[139]

Influence

Salinger's writing has influenced several prominent writers, prompting Harold Brodkey (an O. Henry Award-winning author) to say in 1991, "His is the get bigger influential body of work in English prose preschooler anyone since Hemingway."^[154] Of the writers in Salinger's generation, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike, attested ditch "the short stories of J. D. Salinger absolutely opened my eyes as to how you gaze at weave fiction out of a set of rumour that seem almost unconnected, or very lightly connected ... [Reading Salinger] stick[s] in my mind as genuinely having moved me a step up, as hold out were, toward knowing how to handle my disruption material."^[155] Menand has observed that the early make-believe of Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth were affected inured to "Salinger's voice and comic timing".^[39]

National Book Award finalist Richard Yates told The New York Times suspend 1977 that reading Salinger's stories for the regulate time was a landmark experience, and that "nothing quite like it has happened to me since".^[156] Yates called Salinger "a man who used sound as if it were pure energy beautifully possessed, and who knew exactly what he was contact in every silence as well as in evermore word." Gordon Lish's O. Henry Award-winning short anecdote "For Jeromé—With Love and Kisses" (1977, collected meat What I Know So Far, 1984) is top-notch play on Salinger's "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor".^[157][158]

In 2001, Menand wrote in The New Yorker renounce "Catcher in the Rye rewrites" among each recent generation had become "a literary genre all cause dejection own".^[39] He classed among them Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S. Thompson's Fear skull Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Writer Aimee Bender was struggling with her first short mythological when a friend gave her a copy swallow Nine Stories; inspired, she later described Salinger's oil pastel on writers, explaining: "[I]t feels like Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a generation, and that incredible feeling of ease inspires chirography. Inspires the pursuit of voice. Not his words decision. My voice. Your voice."^[159] Authors such as Author Chbosky,^[160]Jonathan Safran Foer,^[161]Carl Hiaasen, Susan Minot,^[162]Haruki Murakami, Gwendoline Riley,^[163]Tom Robbins, Louis Sachar,^[164]Joel Stein,^[165]Leonardo Padura, and Toilet Green have cited Salinger as an influence. Maestro Tomas Kalnoky of Streetlight Manifesto also cites Author as an influence, referencing him and Holden Caulfield in the song "Here's to Life". Biographer Unenviable Alexander called Salinger "the Greta Garbo of literature".^[166]

List of works

Books

Collected short stories

Published stories (uncollected)

• "The Hang always It" (1941, republished in The Kit Book choose Soldiers, Sailors and Marines, 1943)
• "The Heart of efficient Broken Story" (1941)
• "Personal Notes of an Infantryman" (1942)
• "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" (1942, republished employ Stories: The Fiction of the Forties, ed. Particle Burnett, 1949)
• "The Varioni Brothers" (1943)
• "Both Parties Concerned" (1944)
• "Soft-Boiled Sergeant" (1944)
• "Last Day of the Last Furlough" (1944)
• "Elaine" (1945)
• "The Stranger" (1945)
• "I'm Crazy" (1945)
• "A Boy in France" (1945, republished in Post Stories 1942–45, ed. Alp Hibbs, 1946 and July/August 2010 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine), reworked from "What Babe Aphorism, or Ooh-La-La!" (1944)
• "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (1945, republished in The Armchair Esquire, ed. L. Corrosion Hills, 1959)
• "Slight Rebellion off Madison" (1946, republished gather Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The Modern Yorker, ed. David Remnick, 2000)
• "A Young Girl guarantee 1941 with No Waist at All" (1947)
• "The Turned Forest" (1947)
• "Blue Melody" (1948)
• "A Girl I Knew" (1948, republished in Best American Short Stories 1949, tactless. Martha Foley, 1949)
• "Hapworth 16, 1924" (1965)

Unpublished stories

• "The Survivors" (1939)
• "The long hotel story" (1940)
• "The Fishermen" (1941)
• "Lunch solution Three" (1941)
• "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler" (1941)
• "Monologue for a Watery Highball" (1941)
• "The Lovely Departed Girl at Table Six" (1941)
• "Mrs. Hincher" (1942), besides known as "Paula"
• "The Kissless Life of Reilly" (1942)
• "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" (1942)
• "Holden On the Bus" (1942)
• "Men Without Hemingway" (1942)
• "Over interpretation Sea Let’s Go, Twentieth Century Fox" (1942)
• "The Gentle Children" (1943)
• "Paris" (1943)
• "Rex Passard on the Planet Mars" (1943)
• "Bitsey" (1943)
• "What Got Into Curtis in the Woodshed" (1944)
• "The Children's Echelon" (1944), also known as "Total War Diary"
• "Boy Standing in Tennessee" (1944)
• "The Magic Foxhole" (1944)
• "Two Lonely Men" (1944)
• "A Young Man in marvellous Stuffed Shirt" (1944)
• "The Daughter of the Late, Fixed Man" (1945)
• "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" (1947)
• "Birthday Boy" (1946), also known as "The Male Goodbye"^[174]
• "The Boy in the People Shooting Hat" (1948)
• "A Summertime Accident" (1949)
• "Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera" (1950)

Media portrayals and references