[Infowarrior] - RIP JD Salinger

Thu Jan 28 19:50:36 UTC 2010

Goodbye, Holden Caulfied (and fellow 'Pency' alum!)      -rick

˜Catcher in the Rye"  author J.D. Salinger dies
Writer who shunned the world he shocked died in his isolated home at 91
The Associated Press
updated 1:38 p.m. ET, Thurs., Jan. 28, 2010

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/35127071/ns/today-today_books/?GT1=43001

NEW YORK - J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and  
fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired  
a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's  
son said in a statement from Salinger's literary representative. He  
had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote  
house in Cornish, N.H.

Immortal anti-hero

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the  
twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of  
anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The  
Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection,  
advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will  
be "a source of wonder and delight â€” and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy,"  
Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since  
Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing â€” more than 60  
million copies worldwide â€” and its impact incalculable. Decades  
after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most  
American of dreams â€” to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over  
identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and  
fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher"  
presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness  
of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only  
intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis  
Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The  
Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's  
message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the  
1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version  
of Salinger's narrator.

The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan  
Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's  
novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book  
holds many answers."

By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but  
Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was  
discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.

Other works
Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of  
"Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great  
affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as  
a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.

The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for  
Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the  
little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and  
Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest  
for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his  
mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.

"Everyone who works here and writes here at The New Yorker, even now,  
decades after his silence began, does so with a keen awareness of J.D.  
Salinger's voice," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, where  
many of Salinger's stories appeared. "In fact, he is so widely read in  
America, and read with such intensity, that it's hard to think of any  
reader, young and old, who does not carry around the voices of Holden  
Caulfield or Glass family members."

"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden  
recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for  
failing four classes and for general apathy.

He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere  
from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid  
sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a  
cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as just so much  
phoniness.

"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he  
reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I  
swear it's a stupid question."

"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading,  
periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried  
by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked,  
or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of 'The Catcher in the  
Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best  
friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for  
"20th Century Authors."

"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on  
a shelf out of their reach," he added.

Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam,  
Carpenters" and "Seymour â€” An Introduction," both featuring the  
neurotic, fictional Glass family which appeared in much of his work.

His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker  
in 1965. By then he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child  
whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the  
greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once  
commented.

In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book â 
€” prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical  
Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry  
Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at  
least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.

"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in  
a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I  
write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to  
do it."

â€˜Ego of cast ironâ€™
Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His  
father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived  
for years on Park Avenue.

Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of  
trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military  
Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the  
covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published  
his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.

He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with  
him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an  
unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.

Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an  
intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the  
bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his  
proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E.  
Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of  
cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced  
that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman  
Melville.

Praise and condemnation
Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the  
Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post.  
Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New  
Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.

The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were  
blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times  
found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and observed that  
Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the  
adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."

But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive,  
human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T.  
Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.

"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a  
book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too  
easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by  
writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or  
good intention."

Seeking seclusion

The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the  
door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he  
married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and  
Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly married  
in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her).

Meanwhile, he was refusing interviews, instructing his agent to  
forward no fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing  
in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through  
seclusion.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf- 
mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."

"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations  
with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to  
write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a  
little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."

Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of  
"Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down  
numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from  
Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey  
Weinstein also were rejected.

Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued  
a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the  
author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and  
Salinger dropped the suit.

Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an  
important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused  
to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton,  
that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had  
copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which  
came out in a revised edition in 1988.

In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's  
"60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined  
Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.

The curtain parts

Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In  
1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the  
World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in  
the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an  
unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric  
eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.

Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to  
his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher"  
portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine  
and spoke in tongues.

Ms. Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely  
determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."

URL: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/35127071/ns/today-today_books/?GT1=43001