J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger
Salinger in the 1950s. Salinger in the 1950s.
Born	(1919-01-01) January 1, 1919 Manhattan, New York
Occupation	Novelist and Writer

Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for The Catcher in the Rye, a classic novel that has enjoyed enduring popularity since its publication in 1951. A major theme in Salinger's work is the strong yet delicate mind of "disturbed" adolescents, and the redemptive capacity of children in the lives of such young men. Salinger is also known for his reclusive nature; he has not given an interview since 1974, and has not made a public appearance, nor published any new work, since 1965. In the mid 1990s, there was a flurry of excitement when a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to bring out the first book version of his final published story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," but amid the ensuing publicity, Salinger quickly withdrew from the arrangement.

Life

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York, to a jewish father and a half-Scottish, half-Irish mother. (His mother changed her name to Miriam and passed as Jewish when she married; J. D. did not find out that his mother was not Jewish until just after his bar mitzvah ). His father, Solomon, worked for a meat importer. The young Salinger attended public schools on the West Side, the private McBurney School in ninth and tenth grades, and then was happy to get away from the over-protectiveness of his mother by entering the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, . He started his freshman year at New York University (NYU), but dropped out the next spring to work on a cruise ship. The next fall, he was prevailed upon to learn the meat-importing business and was sent to work at the company in Vienna, where he could also perfect his French and German skills. He left Austria only a month or so before the country fell to Hitler, on March 12, 1938. That fall, he attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, but for only one semester. While there, Salinger was called "the worst English student in the history of the College" by one of his professors. Salinger attended a Columbia University evening writing class in 1939. The teacher was Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story Magazine. During the second semester of the class, Burnett saw some degree of talent in the young author. In the March-April 1940 issue of Story, Burnett published Salinger's debut short story, a vignette of several aimless youths, entitled The Young Folks. Burnett and Salinger would correspond for several years thereafter, although a mix-up involving the proposed publication of a short story collection, also entitled The Young Folks, would leave them estranged.

In 1941, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of Eugene O'Neill, writing long daily letters to her. This ended when Oona began a relationship with Charlie Chaplin.

Salinger was drafted into the Army in 1942, where he saw combat with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in some of the fiercest fighting of World War II, including action on Utah Beach on D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge. During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, he met Ernest Hemingway, then a war correspondent, in Paris. Salinger was assigned to Counter-Intelligence, in which he interrogated prisoners of war, putting his foreign language skills to use. He was among the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp. He told his daughter later, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." His experiences, perhaps, scarred him emotionally (he was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated), and it is likely that he drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories, such as "For Esmé with Love and Squalor," which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. He continued to publish stories in magazines, such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, during and after his war experience.

After the defeat of Germany, he signed up for a six-month period of "de-Nazification" duty in Germany. Among those Nazis he arrested was a low-level official, Sylvia, whom he married and brought back to the States. The marriage fell apart after a few months and Sylvia returned to Germany. (In 1972, his daughter Margaret was with her father when he received a letter from Sylvia. He looked at the envelope, tore it up, and discarded it, unread. He said that that was the first time he had heard from her since she left, but "when he was finished with a person, he was through with them".)

From The New Yorker to novels

By 1948, with the publication of a critically-acclaimed short story entitled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Salinger began to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker. "Bananafish" was one of the most popular stories ever published in the magazine, and he quickly became one of the publication's best-known authors. It was not his first experience with the magazine; in 1942, Salinger had received his first acceptance from The New Yorker for a story entitled "Slight Rebellion off Madison," which featured a semi-autobiographical character named Holden Caulfield. The story was held from publication until 1946 because of the war. "Slight Rebellion" was related to several other stories featuring the Caulfield family, but perspective shifted from older brother Vince to Holden.

Salinger had confided to several people that he felt Holden deserved a novel, and The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. It was an immediate success, although early critical reactions were mixed. While never confirmed by Salinger himself, it is believed that several of the events in the novel are semi-autobiographical. A novel driven by the nuanced, intricate character of Holden, the plot is quite simple. The book became famous for Salinger's extensive and exceptional eye for subtle complexity, detail, description, ironic humor, and the depressing and desperate atmosphere of New York City. The novel was banned in some countries, and some US locales, because of its bold and offensive use of language; "goddam" appears 255 times. The book is still widely read, particularly in the United States, where it is considered an especially authoritative depiction of teenage angst. It is not unusual to see The Catcher in the Rye on a "required reading" list for American high school students. It still sells about 250,000 copies per year as of 2000.

In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven short stories in The New Yorker ("Bananafish" among them), as well as two that they had rejected. The collection was published as Nine Stories in the United States, and For Esmé with Love and Squalor in the UK (after one of the most beloved stories). It was also very successful, although Salinger had already begun to tightly regulate publicity. He would not allow publishers to illustrate the dust jacket, so that his readers would have no preconceived notion of how the characters looked.

Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. Each contained a pair of related short stories or novellas. Some of the material had been originally published in the The New Yorker.

In July 1951, his friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell in Book of the Month Club News asked Salinger about his literary influences. Salinger said, “A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's right."

Later years

After the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger gradually withdrew into himself. In 1953, he moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time in Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with the high school students who treated him as one of their own. However, after one interview for the high school newspaper ended up in the city paper, Salinger felt betrayed. Salinger withdrew from the high schoolers entirely and was seen less frequently around the town, only seeing one close friend regularly, jurist Learned Hand.

In 1955, when he was 36, he married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student. He insisted that she drop out of school, only four months shy of graduation, and live with him, which she did. Certain elements of the story "Franny", published in January, 1955, are based on Claire, including the fact that Claire had the book The Way of the Pilgrim. They had two children, Margaret and Matthew. Due to their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Margaret reports that her mother admits living with Salinger was not easy, due to the isolation and his controlling nature, and the jealousy of Margaret replacing her in Salinger's affection. Margaret was sick much of the time, but Salinger refused to take her to a doctor as he had embraced Christian Science. In later years, Claire confessed to Margaret that she, Claire, went "over the edge;" she had made plans to murder the thirteen-month-old Margaret and then commit suicide. It was to happen during a trip to New York with her husband. "It would be she, Claire, not the fictional Seymour, who'd go bananas and leave guts spattered across the hotel room for the horrified spouse to witness." Instead, Claire, when in the hotel, acted on a sudden impulse to take the child and run away. The marriage with Claire ended in divorce in 1965.

His last published work was "Hapworth 16, 1924," an epistolary novella in the form of a long letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass from summer camp, that was published in the New Yorker in June 1965. It is said that, on several occasions in the 1970s, he was on the verge of publishing another work but decided against it at the last minute. In 1978, Newsweek reported that Salinger, while attending a banquet in an army friend's honor, said he had recently finished "a long, romantic book set in World War II," but no further details are known about that book.

Further exposure

Salinger tried to escape public exposure and attention as much as possible ("A writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him," he wrote.) However, he continued to struggle with the unwanted attention he received as a popular-culture figure.

On learning of the intent of British writer Ian Hamilton to publish In Search of J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935-65), a biography including letters Salinger had written to other authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the book's publication. The book was finally published with the letters' contents paraphrased. The court ruled that, though a person may own a letter physically, the language within it belongs to the author. An unintended consequence of the lawsuit was that many details of Salinger's private life, including that he had written two novels and many stories but left them unpublished, became public in the form of court transcripts.

In 1972, when Salinger was 53, he had a year-long relationship with 18-year old writer Joyce Maynard, already an experienced writer for Seventeen magazine. The New York Times had asked Maynard to write an article for them which, when published as "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back On Life" on April 23, 1972, made her a celebrity-of-the-moment. Salinger wrote a note to her warning her about living with such fame. They corresponded. Maynard spent ten months as a guest in Salinger's home; the relationship ended, he told his teenaged daughter Margaret at a family outing, because Maynard wanted children, and he felt he could not stand the reality of children again (as opposed to the fantasy children in his writings) . Twenty five years later, controversy ensued when Maynard put Salinger's letters to her up for auction. The sale helped to publicize a memoir of Maynard's, At Home in the World : A Memoir, which, among other indiscretions, described how Maynard's mother had consulted with her on how to appeal to the aging author. Maynard claimed that she was forced to do so for financial reasons; she would have preferred to donate them to Beinecke Library. In 1999, software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,000 and announced his intention to return them to Salinger .

In a surprising move, Salinger gave a small publisher, Orchises Press, permission to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924," the previously uncollected novella; it was to be published in 1997, and listings for it appeared on Amazon.com and other book-sellers. However, the date was pushed back a number of times, the last time to 2002. It was not published and no new date has been set.

File:Jd salinger.jpg

Margaret Salinger's memoir Dream Catcher, its cover featuring a rare photograph of Salinger.

In 2000, Salinger's daughter Margaret Salinger, by his second wife, Claire Douglas, published Dream Catcher: A Memoir. In her "tell-all" book, Ms. Salinger dispelled many of the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton's book. Foremost among these challenges is that Salinger's experience with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder somehow means that he is a psychologically scarred individual who cannot deal with the traumatic nature of his war service. Ms. Salinger paints a picture of J. D. as a man immensely proud of his service record, maintaining his military haircut, service jacket, and moving about his compound (and town) in an old Jeep. Ms. Salinger offered many insights into the Salinger myths, including her father's supposed long-time interest in macrobiotics and involvement with what is today known as "alternative medicine" and Eastern philosophies.

Salinger had been a follower of Zen Buddhism, and had met the scholar D. T. Suzuki. Then he became a life-long student of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. This has been described at length by Som P. Ranchan in his book, An Adventure in Vedanta: J. D. Salinger's the Glass Family (1990). Sri Ramakrishna and his student Vivekananda were important contemporary figures he studied. In this tradition, celibacy and detachment from human responsibilities such as family are emphasized for those seeking enlightenment. Margaret Salinger says that she may have never been born if her father had not read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda who brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the "householder" (i.e. married person, with children). J. D. and Claire were initiated into this path of Kriya yoga in a small store-front Hindu temple in a lower-middle class neighborhood of Washington, DC. They received a mantra and breathing exercises that they were to practice for ten minutes twice a day. Salinger had sudden jumps of enthusiasm for different belief-systems that he then insisted Claire also follow. Salinger tried Dianetics (later called Scientology), even meeting L. Ron Hubbard himself, Claire recalls. [1] This was followed by a number of spiritual/medical/nutritional belief systems including Christian Science, teachings of Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, accupuncture, macrobiotics, fasting, megadoses of Vitamin C, vomiting to remove impurities, solar reflectors for tanning, drinking one's own urine (this is part of the folk-medicine of several cultures around the world; see urine therapy), "speaking in tongues" (glossolalia) which he learned at a Charismatic church, and sitting in a Reichian "orgone box" to accumulate "orgone energy."

Ms. Salinger writes that J. D. rarely had sex with his wife, kept her "a virtual prisoner," refused to allow her to see friends or relatives, insisted on extensive meals and other house-work like laundered and ironed sheets in their poorly equipped rural house. Perhaps the most insightful myth-busting that Ms. Salinger offers describes her father as anything but a recluse or withdrawn. She claims that her father travels often, has friends all over the world, and is a bon vivant in every aspect, except where publicity and celebrity are concerned.

Salinger's third wife is Colleen O'Neill (b. June 11, 1959), a nurse and quiltmaker. She is 40 years younger than her husband. Colleen told Margaret that she and Salinger were trying to have a child.

Trivia

• Salinger is also the father of actor Matt Salinger, Margaret's brother, most famous for starring in a direct-to-video version of Captain America.

• In the check in between the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert jokingly claimed he was interviewing Salinger. Stewart playfully said "Why must you lie" and he responded, "If you really want to know about it..." alluding to Holden Caufield's opening in The Catcher in the Rye. Colbert ended with "Raise High the Roofbeam, Jon-o!"

• At the end of another episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert jokingly apologized to Salinger and Nelson Mandela for not having time to interview them during the show, which featured appearances by Henry Kissinger, Peter Frampton and N.Y. governor-elect Eliot Spitzer.

• Salinger refuses to allow any more of his works to be recreated in film; he has not licensed any of his stories or novels since "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (released as My Foolish Heart), which he reportedly detested. (Jerry Lewis, for one, attempted to get the rights to Catcher in the Rye.) Salinger however is a classic film lover and has an extensive collection of classic movies from the 1940s in 16mm prints (this, of course, predating VCRs).

• The novel Shoeless Joe, by author W. P. Kinsella, features the protagonist seeking out J. D. Salinger. When this book was adapted into film as Field of Dreams, the character was changed to a fictional author, "Terence Mann" (played by James Earl Jones).

• The novel The Catcher in the Rye was carried by Mark David Chapman at the time he assassinated John Lennon on December 8, 1980. John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, was reported to be obsessed by the novel.

• In 2002, 80 letters from writers, critics and fans to Mr. Salinger were published in the book Letters to J. D. Salinger, edited by Chris Kubica.

• Salinger has continued to write in a disciplined fashion, a few hours every morning. Salinger has several floor-to-ceiling safes containing manuscripts, marked with notations such as "to be published as-is", "to be edited", etc., in anticipation of his entry into parinirvana (a "final" nirvana) .

• Salinger has three cats named Kitty 1, Kitty 2, and Kitty 3.

Works

Published and collected

• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Holden Caulfield
• Nine Stories (1953)
  • A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948) Glass Family
  • Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut (1948) Glass Family
  • Just Before the War with the Eskimos (1948)
  • The Laughing Man (1949)
  • Down at the Dinghy (1949) Glass Family
  • For Esmé with Love and Squalor (1950)
  • Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes (1951)
  • De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952)
  • Teddy (1953) Theodore McArdle

• Franny and Zooey (1961)
  • Franny (1955) Glass Family
  • Zooey (1957) Glass Family

• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
  • Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1955) Glass Family
  • Seymour -- An Introduction (1959) Glass Family

• The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors and Marines (1943)
  • The Hang of it (1941)

• Post Stories 1942-45. Ed: Ben Hibbs (1946)
  • A Boy in France (1945)

• Best American Short Stories 1949. Ed: Martha Foley (1949)
  • A Girl I Knew (1948)

• Stories: The Fiction of the Forties. Ed: Whit Burnett (1949)
  • The Long Debut of Lois Taggett (1942)

• The Armchair Esquire. Ed: L. Rust Hills (1959)
  • This Sandwich Has no Mayonnaise (1945) Vincent (D.B.) Caulfield

• Fiction: Form & Experience. Ed: William M. Jones (1969)
  • Go see Eddie (1940)

• Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker. Ed: David Remnick (2000)
  • Slight Rebellion off Madison (1946) Holden Caulfield

Published and uncollected

• The Young Folks (1940)
• The Heart of a Broken Story (1941)
• Personal Notes on an Infantryman (1942)
• The Varioni Brothers (1943)
• Both Parties Concerned (1944)
• Soft Boiled Sergeant (1944)
• Last Day of the Last Furlough (1944) Holden Caulfield
• Once a Week Won't Kill You (1944)
• Elaine (1945)
• The Stranger (1945)
• I'm Crazy (1945) Holden Caulfield
• A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All (1947)
• The Inverted Forest (1947)
• Blue Melody (1948)
• Hapworth 16, 1924 (1965) Glass Family

See [2]

Unpublished and uncollected

At Princeton Library

• The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls [3] (date unknown) Holden Caulfield
• The Last and Best of the Peter Pans [4] (date unknown) Holden Caulfield
• The Magic Foxhole (1945)
• Two Lonely Men (1944)
• The Children's Echelon (1944)

See [5] [6]

References

• Anonymous (1965). The Way of a Pilgrim. New York: Seabury. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Hamilton, Ian (1988). In Search of J. D. Salinger. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-53468-9. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Kinsella, W. P. (1982). Shoeless Joe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-32047-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Kubica, Chris (2002). Letters to J. D. Salinger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-17800-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Maynard, Joyce (1998). At Home in the World. New York: Picador. ISBN 0-312-19556-7. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Ranchan, Som P. (1989). An Adventure in Vedanta: J. D. Salinger's The glass family. Delhi: Ajanta. ISBN 81-202-0245-7. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Salinger, Margaret (2000). Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press. ISBN 0-671-04281-5. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Wenke, John (1991). J. D. Salinger: A Study of The Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-8334-2. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Yogananda, Paramahansa (1946). Autobiography of a Yogi . Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• The J. D. Salinger "Bananafish" discussion list.
• The Letters to J. D. Salinger book
• Implied meanings in J. D. Salinger stories and reverting (English Pdf) (from http://www.tversu.ru/Science/Hermeneutics/1998-2.html )
• Salinger.org - A Fan site
• Dead Caulfields. The early life and work of J.D. Salinger
• 1988 Audio Interview with Ian Hamilton, author of In Search of J. D. Salinger - RealAudio
• How to Try to Write to J.D. Salinger