[70] In letters from the 1940s, Salinger expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;[71] Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor". [11] He had one sibling, an older sister, Doris (1912–2001). Reprinted in Bloom, Harold, ed. He enjoyed watching actors work, and he enjoyed knowing them. Therefore, he immediately agreed when, in mid-1948, independent film producer Samuel Goldwyn offered to buy the film rights to his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. Early in his time at Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students at Windsor High School. Two collections of his work, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters—all of which had appeared previously in The New Yorker—were published in book form in the early 1960s. He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control. [5], Salinger's mother, Marie (née Jillich), was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scottish descent,[6][7][8] "but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws"[9] and considered herself Jewish after marrying Salinger's father. [55] In a 1953 interview with a high school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining, "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... [I]t was a great relief telling people about it. Salinger was an influential 20th-century American writer. "[73], Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna. [27] He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. [63] The book remains widely read; as of 2004, it was selling about 250,000 copies per year, "with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies". [113] Hamilton published In Search of J.D. [55] He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity. Despite finding her immeasurably self-absorbed (he confided to a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in love with little Oona"), he called her often and wrote her long letters. In the autumn of 1950, at his home in Westport, Connecticut, J. D. Salinger completed The Catcher in the Rye. [157], In the mid-1960s, Salinger was drawn to Sufi mysticism through the writer and thinker Idries Shah's seminal work The Sufis, as were others writers such as Doris Lessing and Geoffrey Grigson and the poets Robert Graves and Ted Hughes. The buyer, a computer programmer, later returned them to Salinger as a gift. [90] The Salingers divorced in 1966. Salinger was the youngest of two children born to Sol Salinger, the son of a … [13], Salinger's Valley Forge 201 file says he was a "mediocre" student, and his recorded IQ between 111 and 115 was slightly above average. After Nine Stories, he published only four stories in the rest of the decade, two in 1955 and one each in 1957 and 1959. Jerome David Salinger (/ˈsælɪndʒər/; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. "[50], In the 1940s, Salinger confided to several people that he was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of his short story "Slight Rebellion off Madison",[51] and Little, Brown and Company published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951. "[69], In a July 1951 profile in Book of the Month Club News, Salinger's friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell asked Salinger about his literary influences. Salinger became reclusive, publishing less frequently. [84] They received a mantra and breathing exercise to practice for ten minutes twice a day. Salinger's family moved to the building in 1932, just in time to enroll him in the McBurney School, a progressive private high school he would fail out of two years later. My voice. There, Salinger met Professor Whit Burnett, who would change his life. [135][136], In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote, "I almost always write about very young people", a statement that has called his credo. [96], While he was living with Maynard, Salinger continued to write in a disciplined fashion, a few hours every morning. The book describes how Maynard's mother had consulted with her on how to appeal to Salinger by dressing in a childlike manner, and describes Maynard's relationship with him at length. One of its revelations was that there were about five unpublished works by Salinger that are scheduled to be released over the next few years. [3] His father, Sol Salinger, traded in kosher cheese, and was from a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent,[4] his own father having been the rabbi for the Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. After a flurry of articles and critical reviews of the story appeared in the press, the publication date was pushed back repeatedly before apparently being canceled altogether. Langston Hughes was an African American writer whose poems, columns, novels and plays made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. [87], Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. Salinger started his freshman year at New York University in 1936. During this time, however, Salinger continued to write, assembling chapters for a new novel whose main character was a deeply unsatisfied young man named Holden Caulfield. Margaret Salinger allowed that "the few men who lived through Bloody Mortain, a battle in which her father fought, were left with much to sicken them, body and soul",[32] but she also painted her father as a man immensely proud of his service record, maintaining his military haircut and service jacket, and moving about his compound (and town) in an old Jeep. Instead, we're going to take a look at the author's childhood home, located at 1133 Park Avenue in New York City. [27], The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. [13][24], In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. According to the first account, the interview ended "disastrously" when a passerby from Cornish attempted to shake Salinger's hand, at which point Salinger became enraged. "Squalor and Redemption: The Age of Salinger,", Beam, A. [79] Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list. Allen Ginsberg is one of the 20th century's most influential poets, regarded as a founding father of the Beat Movement and known for works like "Howl.". Childhood. But over time the American reading public ate the book up and The Catcher in the Rye became an integral part of the academic literature curriculum. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the army, serving from 1942-44. One of them was his last wife, a nurse who was already engaged to be married to someone else when she met him. William Maxwell, the magazine's fiction editor, was impressed enough with "the singular quality of the story" that the magazine asked Salinger to continue revising it. October 20, 2011. [148][149], In 2001, Menand wrote in The New Yorker that "Catcher in the Rye rewrites" among each new generation had become "a literary genre all its own". Inspires the pursuit of voice. [94] Maynard did not return to Yale that fall, and spent ten months as a guest in Salinger's house. Salinger, Failed Recluse", in, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, Columbia University School of General Studies, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All, "JD Salinger | Timeline of Major Events | American Masters | PBS", "J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91", "Hemingway and the creation of twentieth-century dialogue – American author Ernest Hemingway", "Why More Top Novelists Don't Go Hollywood", "Depositions Yield J. D. Salinger Details", "J.D. "[2] But Salinger published only one other thing after that: "Hapworth 16, 1924", a novella in the form of a long letter by seven-year-old Seymour Glass to his parents from summer camp. [143] By the late 1950s, as Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and parenthetical remarks. J.D. For the young writer, who had fiercely boasted in college about his talents, the success he had seemingly craved early in life became something he ran away from once it came. Musician Tomas Kalnoky of Streetlight Manifesto also cites Salinger as an influence, referencing him and Holden Caulfield in the song "Here's To Life". [41] Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged. Salinger, whose nickname as a child was "Sonny," was born on New Year's Day 1919, in New York, New York, the second and last child of Sol and Marie (Miriam) Jillich Salinger. Salinger Documentary & Book, Now Revealed (Mike Has Seen The Film)", "Chris Cooper Is J.D. Life Facts J.D. According to 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, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. His narration in fictional works is characterized by third-person narrative and dialogue form. In 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue, and Salinger enrolled at the McBurney School, a nearby private school. [citation needed], In February 1955, at age 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas (b. The Innocence of Childhood in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. November 9, 2010. Salinger did not escape the war without some trauma, and when it ended he was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown. [119][120][121], In June 2009, Salinger consulted lawyers about the forthcoming U.S. publication of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, by Swedish book publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J. D. California. Salinger that concentrates on his literary career and notes - not only the major events of the author's life from his birth in 1919 to his death in 2010 - but also the construction and publication dates of his better-known works. The achievement was a catharsis. [104] A further account of the interview published in The Paris Review, purportedly by Eppes, has been disowned by her and separately ascribed as a derived work of Review editor George Plimpton.[105][106][107][108]. [citation needed], As The Catcher in the Rye's notoriety grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. [102], Salinger's final interview was in June 1980 with Betty Eppes of The Baton Rouge Advocate, which has been represented somewhat differently, depending on the secondary source. He lived in Weißenburg and, soon after, married Sylvia Welter. [103] In a separate account, emphasis is placed on her contact by letter writing from the local post office, and Salinger's personal initiative to cross the bridge to meet Eppes, who during the interview made clear she was a reporter and did, at the close, take pictures of Salinger as he departed. [59] The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, it had been reprinted eight times. A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret's brother Matt discredited the memoir in a letter to The New York Observer. When Salinger returned to New York in 1946, he quickly set about resuming his life as a writer and soon found his work published in his favorite magazine, The New Yorker. But in December 1941, it accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters". f he were still alive, JD Salinger, the world’s most famous literary hermit, would surely turn his back on any brouhaha surrounding his centenary in … Salinger is the author of the famous 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York, on January 1, 1919. https://www.biography.com/writer/jd-salinger. [112] In May 1986 Salinger learned that the British writer Ian Hamilton intended to publish a biography that made extensive use of letters Salinger had written to other authors and friends. [37] He classed among them Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). [117], In 1996, Salinger gave a small publisher, Orchises Press, permission to publish "Hapworth 16, 1924". [31], Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit also known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant[33] and served in five campaigns.