J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger (born January 1, 1919, Manhattan, New York, U.S.—died January 27, 2010, Cornish, New Hampshire) was an American writer whose novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His corpus of published works also consists of short stories that were printed in magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and The New Yorker. After the success of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger became a recluse. His last published work was a short story in 1965, but he remained an enormously influential figure in contemporary American literature.

Early life and education

Salinger was the son of a Jewish father, Sol Salinger, and a Scotch-Irish Christian mother, Miriam Salinger (née Marie Jillich). He had an older sister, Doris. Like Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger grew up in New York City. He attended public schools until his parents enrolled him in McBurney School, an exclusive Manhattan prep school, in the ninth grade. After he failed (also like Holden), his parents sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, which became the model for Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye. At Valley Forge his plans to become a writer solidified; he served as literary editor of the school yearbook. His other activities there included managing the school’s fencing team—another similarity he shared with Holden Caulfield.

After brief periods at New York and Columbia universities, Salinger devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories began to appear in periodicals in 1940. The next year he had a brief career as a cruise ship entertainment director.

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Wartime experiences

In 1942 Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army. Proficient in French and German, he served as a counterintelligence agent in the 4th Infantry Division and was tasked with interviewing prisoners-of-war, Nazi sympathizers, and military deserters. Two years later Salinger participated in the Normandy landings on Utah Beach on D-Day (June 6, 1944). It was his first time in combat.

Later, Salinger fought in the Battle of the Bulge and participated in the liberation of the concentration camp at Kaufering, Germany, a subcamp of Dachau. While in Europe he met Ernest Hemingway, who was working as a war correspondent and encouraged Salinger in his writing. However, the war seriously affected the young writer’s health. For several weeks he was hospitalized while being treated for “battle fatigue” (post-traumatic stress disorder). During his recovery he wrote a story titled “I’m Crazy,” which was narrated by a teenage character named Holden Caulfield. It was not the first time Holden appeared in one of Salinger’s stories, but it was the first story in which he served as the narrator. “I’m Crazy” was published in December 1945 in Collier’s.

(Read about other writers who went to war in Britannica’s article “War Stories.”)

Literary fame with The Catcher in the Rye and a life in seclusion

After Salinger’s return to the United States (he was honorably discharged in 1946), his name and writing style became increasingly associated with The New Yorker magazine, which published almost all of his later stories. Some of the best of these made use of his wartime experiences: “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (1950) describes a U.S. soldier’s poignant encounter with two British children, and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) concerns the suicide of the sensitive, despairing veteran Seymour Glass.

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Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, whose central character, the sensitive, rebellious Holden Caulfield, relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the “phony” adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist’s couch. The humor and colorful language of The Catcher in the Rye place it in the tradition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger’s child characters, views his life with an added dimension of precocious self-consciousness.

The Catcher in the Rye made Salinger into a literary celebrity. In an attempt to escape fame and recover the loss of his privacy, he moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1953 and went into seclusion. To the end of his life Salinger rarely spoke to the media or engaged with his many fans.

For a while, he continued to publish new work. Nine Stories (1953), a selection of Salinger’s short stories, added to his literary reputation. Several pieces in the collection, which includes “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” feature the siblings of the fictional Glass family. In works such as Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), the introspective Glass children, influenced by their eldest brother Seymour and his death, navigate questions about spirituality and enlightenment. Similar to The Catcher in the Rye, all three books were best-sellers.

Personal life and later years

The reclusive habits of Salinger in his later years made his personal life a matter of speculation among devotees. According to family members, Salinger’s life in seclusion reflected the quest for spiritual enlightenment of his characters in Raise High the Roof Beam. He developed interests in homeopathic medicine and acupuncture, Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, and Christian Science and Scientology. Many critics think Salinger’s esoteric interests were fueled by the trauma of his war experiences.

Salinger was married three times. In 1945 he wed Sylvia Welter, a German woman whom he met in Europe and about whom little else is known. Their marriage lasted eight months. In 1955 he married Claire Douglas, a 19-year-old student at Radcliffe College; they had two children, Margaret and Matthew, before divorcing in 1967.

He subsequently had relationships with several other women, including writer Joyce Maynard, an 18-year-old student at Yale University. In April 1972 she had published an essay in The New York Times Magazine that had impressed him—or perhaps, her youthful appearance in the essay’s accompanying photograph did. Salinger, then 53 years old, wrote to her, and they began a correspondence that led to Maynard dropping out of school and moving in with him. After 10 months they broke up, and Maynard returned to Yale. In 1998 she published At Home in the World, a memoir of their relationship. The following year she auctioned off his letters. Salinger made no public comment, but he privately accused Maynard of exploiting him.

In the late 1980s Salinger married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse who is believed to have been about 40 years younger than him.

Meanwhile, his small literary output was a subject of controversy among critics. The last work Salinger published during his lifetime was a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. It concerns the childhood of Seymour Glass and a letter he writes to his family from summer camp. In 1997 Salinger consented to a publisher’s plans to release Hapworth 16, 1924 as a book, but he suddenly withdrew his support, scuttling its publication.

In 1974 The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, an unauthorized two-volume work of his early pieces, was briefly released to the public, but sales were halted when Salinger filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement. Salinger also sued to stop the publication of a biography of him by Ian Hamilton and an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye. The biography was rewritten and published in 1988 under the title In Search of J.D. Salinger. The sequel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, by John David California (a pseudonym of the Swedish writer Fredrik Colting), was published in Britain in 2009, but a judge barred its publication in the United States.

Other unauthorized works about Salinger include Dream Catcher (2000), a memoir by his daughter that claimed he had been abusive to his second wife. She also chronicled his esoteric beliefs and wrote that his personal habits included arcane health practices such as drinking his own urine. Salinger’s son, however, has disputed his sister’s account.

Death and legacy

Salinger died of natural causes in 2010 at age 91. After his death his literary agents released a statement that read in part,

Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it. His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.

Three years later David Shields and Shane Salerno published Salinger, a best-selling biography that claimed the writer had several unpublished works that would eventually be released. Others in the literary world had also made such claims; Maynard believed Salinger had the manuscripts for at least two novels locked in a safe at his home. Many people speculated that he had written several volumes about the Glass family. However, no new works were forthcoming.

Salinger’s influence on writers of the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st century was immense. His literary voice was characterized by its humor, irony, and a pitch-perfect use of colloquial speech. Among those whose work he influenced are Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, Harold Brodkey, John Updike, and Dave Eggers. After Salinger’s death, Eggers memorialized him in an essay in The New Yorker. He wrote,

His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical…The man was an artist, no doubt about it, and his work was always growing in new—darker, stranger, more wonderfully obsessive—directions. And always, no matter where the stories go (or don’t go), his sentences are so beautiful, and so unlike anyone else’s.