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J. D. SalingerAmerican Decades, 2003Born: 1919 in New York, New York, United StatesDied: January 27, 2010 in United States, New Hampshire, CornishNationality: AmericanOccupation: Novelist

Prep School Student.J. D. (Jerome David) Salinger was born on 1 January 1919 in New York City. He was the

second of two children born to Solomon Salinger (a successful Jewish cheese merchant) and his wife Miriam

(who was Scottish-born and, according to a widespread rumor, had changed her name from Marie to be

accepted by Solomon's family). Salinger had a great deal of difficulty getting along in both public and prep

schools and, as a last resort, his father enrolled him in the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. Valley

Forge later became the model for the fictional Pensey Prep in his classic work , althoughThe Catcher in the Rye

Salinger was a far less troubled student than his character Holden Caulfield. Before graduating from Valley

Forge in 1936, Salinger wrote the lyrics to the school anthem, a creation that gave little hint of his literary

promise: "...The lights are dimmed, the bugle sounds, The notes we'll ne'er forget. And now a group of smiling

lads: We part with much regret."

Early Career.After leaving Valley Forge, Salinger briefly attended New York University, but dropped out to

become an entertainer on a cruise ship. He then went to Europe with his father to learn the family cheese

business, but returned as war threatened and again briefly attended college, first at Ursinus College in

Pennsylvania and then Columbia University in New York. Whit Burnett, editor of magazine and Salinger'sStory

instructor at Columbia, published Salinger's "The Young Folks" in 1939, the first of many short stories Salinger

would have published during the next few years.

Served in World War II.Salinger entered the U.S. Army shortly after World War II began, and eventually was

sent to Europe where he participated in the liberation of France and used his language skills to interrogate

German prisoners. One biographer, Ian Hamilton, claims that Salinger was so upset by what he witnessed of thewar that he had to be hospitalized. While serving in Europe, Salinger also continued to write short stories,

several of which were published in popular magazines such as and .Esquire The Saturday Evening Post

(Salinger later refused to have any of these stories republished, and was outraged when they appeared in a

two-volume set in 1974 without his permission. He enlisted both a lawyer and the FBI to retrieve as many

volumes as possible, even though the stories were still readily accessible to anyone who looked at the original

magazines.) After the war ended and Salinger returned to New York, he began to establish a reputation as a

short story writer. His story "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," which later was revised and included in The Catcher

, was the first of numerous Salinger stories to be published in The New Yorker in the 1940s andin the Rye

1950s.

Divorced Twice.Salinger stayed in Europe briefly after World War II ended, and while there he married a

Frenchwoman, whose first name was Sylvia but about whom little else is known. The marriage ended in divorce

soon after Salinger returned to the United States in 1946. In 1955, at the age of 36, he married Claire Douglas,

who was a 19-year-old student when they met and later became a Jungian analyst. That marriage produced two

children and ended in divorce in 1967, shortly after Salinger withdrew completely to their New Hampshire farm,

stopped publishing, and cut off most public contact.

The Glass Family.In 1948, Salinger's first story featuring characters from the Glass family, "A Perfect Day for

Bananafish," was published. All of Salinger's published work from that point on would include stories focusing on

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the Glasses, an upper-class American family whose children, like Holden Caulfield, are innocent idealists adrift in

a corrupt world. The stories also exhibit Salinger's growing interest in Eastern religions, particularly Zen

Buddhism, and read as a whole can be seen as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. The cornerstone of the Glass

family is Seymour, a brother who actually appears only in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." In this story Seymour,

after spending a day walking on a beach and talking with a young girl, returns to his hotel room, lies down next to

his napping wife, and unexpectedly shoots himself. "Bananafish" is generally considered to be one of Salinger's

best-written and best-known short stories.

Wrote His Masterpiece.In 1951 what became Salinger's most famousand, in some circles, most

notoriouswork was published. is a novel that tells about a few days in the life of HoldenThe Catcher in the Rye

Caulfield, a prep school student who is about to flunk out of school and decides to visit his young sister Phoebe

before he heads west to live in a log cabin. Holden is a lonely idealist whose brother has died and who is deeply

upset by the "phony" adult world. Along the way to visiting his sister, Holden himself takes on a number of phony

roles to fool people he encounters. Eventually he envisions himself as a figure who will save innocent children

from the dangers of the world, calling himself the "catcher in the rye" who keeps children from falling off cliffs (in

a slight misquotation of a Robert Burns poem).

Book Sparked Controversy. became increasingly well-known through the 1950s andThe Catcher in the Rye

1960s for two reasons. First, it was one of the first and best-written "coming of age" stories to be published after

World War II. The novel became extremely popular with the group that later would be called the "Baby Boomer"

generation, due to its idealistic hero who was adrift in a corrupt world and decided to drop out of it. It also

became the target of numerous censorship campaigns, because of Holden's language (authentic for an

adolescent boy, but scandalous for the time) and its scathing criticism of society. As a result, for decades The

topped many conservative groups' lists of books that should be banned from public schoolsCatcher in the Rye

and libraries. By the late 1990s, however, was no longer considered as objectionable,The Catcher in the Rye

when compared to other books with even more explicit language and more controversial social topics. An

American Library Association survey published in 1996 found that the novel was accessible in almost 99% of the

libraries that the group had surveyed nationwide.

Other Stories. , a collection of Salinger stories that largely had been published previously inNine Stories

magazines, was published in 1953. Highlights of included "Bananafish" and another famousNine Stories

Salinger story, "For EsmeWith Love and Squalor," in which an American soldier and writer (not part of the

Glass family) recovers from a nervous breakdown after receiving a letter from a young English girl he had met

during the war. In 1961's (a reprint of two previously-published long stories), the youngestFranny and Zooey

Glass daughter Franny is torn between a relationship with an insensitive clod of a boyfriend and her hope for a

pure, spiritual love experience. Zooey, her older brother, spends much of his half of the book trying to save

Franny from the breakdown that finally overtakes her by discussing the nature of religious experience. "Raise

High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction," two more previously-published stories

collected in one volume in 1963, are narrated by Seymour's younger brother Buddy. "Raise High the Roof Beam,

Carpenters" tells the story of Seymour's wedding, from which the groom is conspicuously absent, having eloped

with his fiancee. The story describes the reactions of guests at the event, and Buddy's realization that Seymour's

seemingly rude act is actually a sign of his spiritual sensitivity. "Seymour: An Introduction" continues Buddy's

exploration of Seymour as a spiritual model. Salinger's last published story appeared in in 1965:The New Yorker

"Hapsworth 16, 1924," a letter in which seven-year-old Seymour describes summer camp to his five-year-old

brother Buddy. The letter, recently rediscovered by 46-year-old Buddy, marked a farewell both to the Glass

family and to Salinger's published writings and public appearances.

Chastised By Critics.Many of Salinger's early short stories were well-received by critics, as outstanding

examples of what came to be known as post-modernist literature following World War II and as fascinating

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character studies. However, as Salinger continued to write about the Glass family to the exclusion of all other

themes, critics began to tire of their endlessly unresolved spiritual and emotional struggles. Biographer Hamilton

collected examples of scathing published comments by prestigious critics: John Updike saying that "Salinger

loves the Glasses more than God loves them;" Leslie Fiedler noting that "Salinger of course speaks for the

cleanest, politest, best-dressed, best-fed and best-read among the disaffected;" and, perhaps most cutting of all,

Mary McCarthy concluding that "Salinger's world contains nothing but Salinger." However, many readers still

enjoy the saga of the Glasses and continue to be drawn into the stories, so much so that numerous people claim

to have actually met members of the family!

Reclusive Life.Salinger's long-time literary agent, Dorothy Olding (who represented Salinger until she had a

stroke in 1990, and died in 1997 without ever disclosing secrets about her reclusive client), guarded his privacy

zealously. She did reveal that, at Salinger's request, she had never forwarded any fan mail to him, and she had

destroyed their personal correspondence in 1970. Requests for interviews and proposals from publishers

likewise were routinely rejected even before Salinger moved to New Hampshire permanently in the mid-1960s.

One of the few interviews he did give, and the last, was in 1953 to a New Hampshire high school student he had

befriended, perhaps considering her one of his favored innocent children. Rather than appearing on the local

newspaper's high school page, the interview was marketed as a news scoop. Salinger promptly built a tall fence

surrounding his property and, when he married Claire Douglas shortly afterward, he began to withdraw from

contact even with the neighbors who had been his friends.

Moved to New Hampshire.Shortly after the publication of "Hapsworth 16, 1924" in 1965, and faced with

increasingly nasty reviews by critics, Salinger (in his late 40s, like his character Buddy Glass in "Hapsworth"), left

New York City. And, like another famous character, Holden Caulfield, Salinger set out for a symbolic log cabin far

from "phony" society, taking up permanent residence on his farm in Cornish, New Hampshire. He and his wife

Claire divorced in 1967, and she raised their son and daughter in New Hampshire and Vermont. Since his retreat

to the farm, there have been only rare public sightings of Salinger. He announced his intention never to publish

again, and returned an advance he had received from his publisher after the publication of .Franny and Zooey

Sued Biographer.In the mid-1980s Salinger resurfaced briefly to block publication of a planned biography ofhim by Ian Hamilton. When Hamilton first let Salinger know that he was planning to write a biography, Salinger

strongly urged him not to do so. In the course of researching the biography without the reclusive author's

assistance, Hamilton located correspondence between Salinger and assorted editors and friends, including his

mentor Whit Burnett. Some of the letters, which had been written between 1939 and 1961, were publicly

accessible in the manuscript collections of Princeton University and the University of Texas. Others were

obtained from Hamish Hamilton Publishers in London and from the biographer of the late Judge Learned Hand,

who had been a friend of Salinger. The letters were liberally quoted in Hamilton's draft, and the infuriated

Salingerunaware that the letters still existedfiled a lawsuit demanding that publication of all material from the

letters be prevented. He claimed that Hamilton had invaded his privacy and infringed a copyright on the letters.

In a landmark 1987 decision that affected all subsequent writers of biographies, the U.S. Court of Appeals in

New York decided that such letters still belonged to their writer, even if they were in library collections, and could

not be used without his permission. The U.S. Supreme Court let this decision stand without comment on appeal,

despite fervent arguments that it was an unfair restriction of journalists' free speech. Hamilton was forced to

rewrite the book twice before the finished product, , was finally published in 1988.In Search of J.D. Salinger

Made Rare Public Appearance.Ironically, by filing this lawsuit to protect his privacy, Salinger was forced to

make one of his few public appearances in years. He had to travel to the New York office of attorneys for

Random House, which planned to publish Hamilton's biography, where he sat through an eight-hour deposition

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interview. Even more ironic, during the lawsuit all of the letters that Hamilton had sought to use in the biography

were put on file in the copyright office in New York, where anyone paying a small fee could view them, since the

copyright filing was a public document.

A "New" Story At Last?During the decades that Salinger has lived in seclusion on his New Hampshire farm,

there have been many rumors that he is working on new stories in the writing shed next to his home, but none

has ever materialized. In early 1997, Salinger's agent announced that Orchises Press, a minor Virginia publisher,

was going to publish a book by Salinger. After the excitement settled a bit, it was revealed that the book actuallywas going to be a reprint of Salinger's last published story, "Hapsworth 16, 1924," which had appeared in The

in 1965. The usual mystery surrounding the author, then 78 years-old, grew daily: His agent wouldNew Yorker

not return calls from reporters, and no one could give a definite date of publication. This final installment of the

Glass family saga, a letter from summer camp written by seven-year-old Seymour to his younger brother Buddy,

had not been well-received by critics at its original publication. Based on at least one writer's response to the

news that the long-awaited "new" Salinger work was actually this recycled 32-year-old story, Salinger might have

expected a less than enthusiastic critical response. writer Michiko Kakutani dismissedNew York Times

"Hapsworth" as "a nearly interminable letter," and regretted that the "infinitely engaging author of The Catcher in

" had produced and chosen to republish "a sour, implausible and, sad to say, completely charmlessthe Rye

story."

J. D. Salinger

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994-2001 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, Cengage Learning.

Source Citation:"J. D. Salinger." . Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Detroit: Gale, 2003.American Decades

. Web. 11 Oct. 2010.Gale Biography In Context

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