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writer J. D. Salinger
USINFO | 2013-06-08 13:44
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David J. D. Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer. His last published original work was in 1965, and his last interview in 1980.
Raised in Manhattan, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several in Story magazine in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story A Perfect Day for Bananafish appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his later work. In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish Hapworth 16, 1924 in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity, the release was indefinitely delayed. He made headlines around the globe in June 2009 when he filed a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of the characters from The Catcher in the Rye.Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City, on New Year's Day, 1919. His mother, Marie (née Jillich), was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of Scottish, German and Irish descent.His paternal grandfather, Simon, born in Lithuania, was at one time the rabbi for the Adath Jeshurun congregation in Louisville, Kentucky.His father, Sol Salinger, sold kosher cheese. Salinger's mother changed her name to Miriam and passed as Jewish. Salinger did not learn his mother was not Jewish until just after his bar mitzvah.His only sibling was his older sister Doris (1911–2001).The young Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, then in 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue and Salinger was enrolled at the McBurney School, a nearby private school.At McBurney, he managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper, and appeared in plays.He showed an innate talent for drama, though his father opposed the idea of J.D. becoming an actor.
1133 Park Avenue
The Jewish Salinger had trouble fitting in at his new school and took measures to conform, such as calling himself Jerry.(His family called him Sonny.)His parents then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania.Though he had written for the school newspaper at McBurney, Salinger began writing stories under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight.Salinger was the literary editor of the class yearbook, Cross Sabres. He also participated in the Glee Club, Aviation Club, French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.Salinger's Valley Forge 201 file reveals that he was a mediocre student, and unlike the overachievement enjoyed by members of the Glass family he would go on to write about, his recorded IQ was far from that of a genius.He graduated in 1936.
Salinger started his freshman year at New York University in 1936, and considered studying special education,but dropped out the following spring. That fall, his father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business and he went to work at a company in Vienna, Austria.He left Austria one month before it was annexed by Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.
In the fall of 1938, Salinger attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and wrote a column called skipped diploma, which included movie reviews.He dropped out after one semester.
In 1939, Salinger attended a Columbia University evening writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine. According to Burnett, Salinger did not distinguish himself until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point he suddenly came to life and completed three stories.Burnett told Salinger that his stories were skillful and accomplished, and accepted The Young Folks, a vignette about several aimless youths, for publication in Story.Salinger's debut short story was published in the magazine's March–April 1940 issue. Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded for several years.World War II [edit]
In 1941, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding the debutante 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.Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married.In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly as a performer.
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. Seven of Salinger's stories were rejected by the magazine that year, including Lunch for Three, Monologue for a Watery Highball, and I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. In December 1941, however, it accepted Slight Rebellion off Madison, a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with pre-war jitters.When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered unpublishable; it did not appear in the magazine until 1946.In the spring of 1942, several months after the United States entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the Army, where he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.He was active at Utah Beach on D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge as well as the Huertgen Forest campaign.
During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more soft than his gruff public persona.Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing, and remarked Jesus, he has a helluva talent.The two writers began corresponding; Salinger wrote Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.Salinger added that he was working on a play about Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of his story Slight Rebellion off Madison, and hoped to play the part himself.
Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He was also among the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns.Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated,and he later told his daughter You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live. Both of his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,such as For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, and published several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, and in 1945 rejected a group of 15 poems.Post-war years [edit]
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of Denazification duty in Germany for the Counterintelligence Corps. He lived in Weissenburg and, soon after, married a woman named Sylvia Welter. He brought her to the United States in April 1946, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany.Years later, in 1972, Salinger's daughter Margaret was with him when he received a letter from Sylvia. He looked at the envelope, and without reading it, tore it apart. It was the first time he had heard from her since the breakup, but as Margaret put it, when he was finished with a person, he was through with them.
In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint.Titled The Young Folks, the collection was to consist of twenty stories—ten, like the title story and Slight Rebellion off Madison, were already in print; ten were previously unpublished.Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance on its sale, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book.Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.
By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddhism, to the point that he gave reading lists on the subject to his dates and arranged a meeting with Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki. In 1948, he submitted a short story titled A Perfect Day for Bananafish to The New Yorker. The magazine was so impressed with the singular quality of the story that its editors accepted it for publication immediately, and signed Salinger to a contract that allowed them right of first refusal on any future stories.The critical acclaim accorded Bananafish, coupled with problems Salinger had with stories being altered by the slicks, led him to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker. Bananafish was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a fictional family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny.Salinger eventually published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.
In the early 1940s, Salinger had confided in a letter to Whit Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories in order to achieve financial security.According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was disappointed when rumblings from Hollywood over his 1943 short story The Varioni Brothers came to nothing. 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.Though Salinger sold his story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it would make a good movie,the film version of Wiggily was lambasted by critics upon its release in 1949.Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the melodramatic film departed to such an extent from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg referred to it as a bastardization.As a result of this experience, Salinger never again permitted film adaptations to be made from his work.When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Salinger refused the request, but told his friend, Lillian Ross, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport.
The Catcher in the Rye
Main article The Catcher in the Rye
Cover of The Catcher in the Rye 1985 edition
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,and The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951 by Little, Brown and Company.The novel's plot is simple,detailing sixteen-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City following his expulsion, and departure, from an elite prep school. Not only was he expelled from his current school, he had also been expelled from three previous schools.The book is more notable for the persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden.He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the phoniness of adulthood, and his own duplicity.In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was sort of autobiographical, explaining that My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... it was a great relief telling people about it.
Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging from The New York Times's hailing of Catcher as an unusually brilliant first novel to denigrations of the book's monotonous language and the immorality and perversion of Holden,who uses religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution.The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, The Catcher in the Rye had been reprinted eight times. It spent thirty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.
The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late 1950s, according to Ian Hamilton, it had become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed.It has been compared to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Newspapers began publishing articles about the Catcher Cult,and the novel was banned in several countries—as well as some U.S. schools—because of its subject matter and what Catholic World reviewer Riley Hughes called an excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language.One diligent parent counted 237 appearances of the word goddam in the novel, along with fifty-eight of bastard, thirty-one of Chrissake and six of fuck.
In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools (after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men).The book remains widely read; in 2004, the novel was selling about 250,000 copies per year, with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies.
In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received (and rejected) numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn.Since its publication, there has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder,Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg among those seeking to secure the rights. Salinger stated in the 1970s that Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden.Salinger repeatedly refused, though, and in 1999, Joyce Maynard definitively concluded The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger.
Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish
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 responded 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, Dostoevsky, 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. In letters written in the 1940s, Salinger had expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as Fitzgerald's successor.Salinger's A Perfect Day For Bananafish has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald's earlier published short story May Day.
After several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, in 1952, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life.He became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story Teddy features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights.He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in the story Hapworth 16, 1924, the character of Seymour Glass describes him as one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century.
In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker (Bananafish among them), as well as two that the magazine 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 Salinger's best-known stories.The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—remarkably so for a volume of short stories, according to Hamilton.Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.Already tightening his grip on publicity, though, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.
As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from an apartment at 300 East 57th Street,New York, to Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time at Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students at Windsor High School. Salinger invited them to his house frequently to play records and talk about problems at school.One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper. However, after Blaney's interview appeared prominently in the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all contact with the high schoolers without explanation.He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.He also began to publish with less frequency. After the 1953 publication of Nine Stories, he published only four stories through the rest of the decade; two in 1955 and one each in 1957 and 1959.
Marriage and family
In June 1955, at the age of 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student (her father was the art critic Robert Langton Douglas). They had two children, Margaret (b. December 10, 1955) and Matthew (b. February 13, 1960). Margaret Salinger wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, had her father not read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the householder (a married person with children).[86] After their marriage, J.D. and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya yoga in a small store-front Hindu temple in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1955.They received a mantra and breathing exercises to practice for ten minutes twice a day.
Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she did. Certain elements of the story Franny, published in January 1955, are based on his relationship with Claire, including her ownership of the book The Way of the Pilgrim.[88] Because of their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated by Salinger's ever-changing religious beliefs. Though she committed herself to Kriya yoga, she remembered that Salinger would chronically leave Cornish to work on a story for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone or destroyed and some new 'ism' we had to follow.Claire believed it was to cover the fact that Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn't face the quality of, or couldn't face publishing, what he had created.
After abandoning Kriya yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), even meeting its founder L. Ron Hubbard, but according to Claire he was quickly disenchanted with it.This was followed by an adherence to a number of spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems including an interest in Christian Science, Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, acupuncture, and macrobiotics.
Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after the first child was born; according to Margaret, Claire felt that her daughter had replaced her in Salinger's affections.The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but Salinger, having embraced the tenets of Christian Science, refused to take her to a doctor.According to Margaret, her mother admitted to her years later that she went over the edge in the winter of 1957 and had made plans to murder her 13-month-old infant and then commit suicide. Claire had intended to do it during a trip to New York City with Salinger, but she instead acted on a sudden impulse to take Margaret from the hotel and run away. After a few months, Salinger persuaded her to return to Cornish.
Last publications and Maynard relationship
Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction in 1963. Each book contained two short stories or novellas, previously published in The New Yorker, about members of the Glass family. These four stories were originally published between 1955 and 1959, and were the only ones Salinger had published since Nine Stories. On the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference to his interest in privacy It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.
On September 15, 1961, Time magazine devoted its cover to Salinger. In an article that profiled his life of recluse, the magazine reported that the Glass family series is nowhere near completion ... Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy.[4] However, Salinger published only one other story after that Hapworth 16, 1924, a novella in the form of a long letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass while at summer camp. His first new work in six years, the novella took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker, and was universally critically panned. Around this time, Salinger had isolated Claire from friends and relatives and made her—in the words of Margaret Salinger—a virtual prisoner.[89] Claire separated from him in September 1966; their divorce was finalized on October 3, 1967.
In 1972, at the age of 53, Salinger had a relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard that lasted for nine months. Maynard, at this time, was 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. Salinger wrote a letter to her warning about living with fame. After exchanging 25 letters, Maynard moved in with Salinger the summer after her freshman year at Yale University.Maynard did not return to Yale that fall, and spent ten months as a guest in Salinger's Cornish home. The relationship ended, he told his daughter Margaret at a family outing, because Maynard wanted children, and he felt he was too old.
However, in her own autobiography, Maynard paints a different picture, saying Salinger abruptly ended the relationship and refused to take her back. She had dropped out of Yale to be with him, even forgoing a scholarship. Maynard later writes in her own memoir how she came to find out that Salinger had begun relationships with young women by exchanging letters. One of those letter recipients included Salinger's last wife, a nurse who was already engaged to be married to someone else when she met the author.
While he was living with Maynard, Salinger continued to write in a disciplined fashion, a few hours every morning. According to Maynard, by 1972 he had completed two new novels.In a rare 1974 interview with The New York Times, he explained There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.According to Maynard, he saw publication as a damned interruption.In her memoir, Margaret Salinger describes the detailed filing system her father had for his unpublished manuscripts A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.A neighbor said that Salinger told him that he had written 15 unpublished novels.
Salinger's final interview was in June 1980 with Betty Eppes of The Baton Rouge Advocate. Eppes was an attractive young woman who misrepresented herself as an aspiring novelist, and managed to record audio of the interview as well as take several photographs of Salinger, both without his knowledge or consent. The interview ended disastrously when a local passer-by from Cornish attempted to shake the famous author's hand, at which point Salinger became enraged.A sordid account of the interview was later published by Eppes in The Paris Review.
Raised in Manhattan, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school, and published several in Story magazine in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story A Perfect Day for Bananafish appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his later work. In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year.
The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.
Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish Hapworth 16, 1924 in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity, the release was indefinitely delayed. He made headlines around the globe in June 2009 when he filed a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of the characters from The Catcher in the Rye.Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City, on New Year's Day, 1919. His mother, Marie (née Jillich), was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of Scottish, German and Irish descent.His paternal grandfather, Simon, born in Lithuania, was at one time the rabbi for the Adath Jeshurun congregation in Louisville, Kentucky.His father, Sol Salinger, sold kosher cheese. Salinger's mother changed her name to Miriam and passed as Jewish. Salinger did not learn his mother was not Jewish until just after his bar mitzvah.His only sibling was his older sister Doris (1911–2001).The young Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, then in 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue and Salinger was enrolled at the McBurney School, a nearby private school.At McBurney, he managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper, and appeared in plays.He showed an innate talent for drama, though his father opposed the idea of J.D. becoming an actor.
1133 Park Avenue
The Jewish Salinger had trouble fitting in at his new school and took measures to conform, such as calling himself Jerry.(His family called him Sonny.)His parents then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania.Though he had written for the school newspaper at McBurney, Salinger began writing stories under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight.Salinger was the literary editor of the class yearbook, Cross Sabres. He also participated in the Glee Club, Aviation Club, French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.Salinger's Valley Forge 201 file reveals that he was a mediocre student, and unlike the overachievement enjoyed by members of the Glass family he would go on to write about, his recorded IQ was far from that of a genius.He graduated in 1936.
Salinger started his freshman year at New York University in 1936, and considered studying special education,but dropped out the following spring. That fall, his father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business and he went to work at a company in Vienna, Austria.He left Austria one month before it was annexed by Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.
In the fall of 1938, Salinger attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and wrote a column called skipped diploma, which included movie reviews.He dropped out after one semester.
In 1939, Salinger attended a Columbia University evening writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine. According to Burnett, Salinger did not distinguish himself until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point he suddenly came to life and completed three stories.Burnett told Salinger that his stories were skillful and accomplished, and accepted The Young Folks, a vignette about several aimless youths, for publication in Story.Salinger's debut short story was published in the magazine's March–April 1940 issue. Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded for several years.World War II [edit]
In 1941, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding the debutante 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.Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married.In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly as a performer.
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. Seven of Salinger's stories were rejected by the magazine that year, including Lunch for Three, Monologue for a Watery Highball, and I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. In December 1941, however, it accepted Slight Rebellion off Madison, a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with pre-war jitters.When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered unpublishable; it did not appear in the magazine until 1946.In the spring of 1942, several months after the United States entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the Army, where he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.He was active at Utah Beach on D-Day and in the Battle of the Bulge as well as the Huertgen Forest campaign.
During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more soft than his gruff public persona.Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing, and remarked Jesus, he has a helluva talent.The two writers began corresponding; Salinger wrote Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.Salinger added that he was working on a play about Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of his story Slight Rebellion off Madison, and hoped to play the part himself.
Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He was also among the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns.Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated,and he later told his daughter You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live. Both of his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,such as For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, and published several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, and in 1945 rejected a group of 15 poems.Post-war years [edit]
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of Denazification duty in Germany for the Counterintelligence Corps. He lived in Weissenburg and, soon after, married a woman named Sylvia Welter. He brought her to the United States in April 1946, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany.Years later, in 1972, Salinger's daughter Margaret was with him when he received a letter from Sylvia. He looked at the envelope, and without reading it, tore it apart. It was the first time he had heard from her since the breakup, but as Margaret put it, when he was finished with a person, he was through with them.
In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint.Titled The Young Folks, the collection was to consist of twenty stories—ten, like the title story and Slight Rebellion off Madison, were already in print; ten were previously unpublished.Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance on its sale, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book.Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.
By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddhism, to the point that he gave reading lists on the subject to his dates and arranged a meeting with Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki. In 1948, he submitted a short story titled A Perfect Day for Bananafish to The New Yorker. The magazine was so impressed with the singular quality of the story that its editors accepted it for publication immediately, and signed Salinger to a contract that allowed them right of first refusal on any future stories.The critical acclaim accorded Bananafish, coupled with problems Salinger had with stories being altered by the slicks, led him to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker. Bananafish was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a fictional family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny.Salinger eventually published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.
In the early 1940s, Salinger had confided in a letter to Whit Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories in order to achieve financial security.According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was disappointed when rumblings from Hollywood over his 1943 short story The Varioni Brothers came to nothing. 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.Though Salinger sold his story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it would make a good movie,the film version of Wiggily was lambasted by critics upon its release in 1949.Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the melodramatic film departed to such an extent from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg referred to it as a bastardization.As a result of this experience, Salinger never again permitted film adaptations to be made from his work.When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Salinger refused the request, but told his friend, Lillian Ross, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport.
The Catcher in the Rye
Main article The Catcher in the Rye
Cover of The Catcher in the Rye 1985 edition
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,and The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951 by Little, Brown and Company.The novel's plot is simple,detailing sixteen-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City following his expulsion, and departure, from an elite prep school. Not only was he expelled from his current school, he had also been expelled from three previous schools.The book is more notable for the persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden.He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the phoniness of adulthood, and his own duplicity.In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was sort of autobiographical, explaining that My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... it was a great relief telling people about it.
Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging from The New York Times's hailing of Catcher as an unusually brilliant first novel to denigrations of the book's monotonous language and the immorality and perversion of Holden,who uses religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution.The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, The Catcher in the Rye had been reprinted eight times. It spent thirty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.
The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late 1950s, according to Ian Hamilton, it had become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed.It has been compared to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Newspapers began publishing articles about the Catcher Cult,and the novel was banned in several countries—as well as some U.S. schools—because of its subject matter and what Catholic World reviewer Riley Hughes called an excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language.One diligent parent counted 237 appearances of the word goddam in the novel, along with fifty-eight of bastard, thirty-one of Chrissake and six of fuck.
In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools (after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men).The book remains widely read; in 2004, the novel was selling about 250,000 copies per year, with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies.
In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received (and rejected) numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn.Since its publication, there has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder,Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg among those seeking to secure the rights. Salinger stated in the 1970s that Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden.Salinger repeatedly refused, though, and in 1999, Joyce Maynard definitively concluded The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger.
Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish
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 responded 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, Dostoevsky, 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. In letters written in the 1940s, Salinger had expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as Fitzgerald's successor.Salinger's A Perfect Day For Bananafish has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald's earlier published short story May Day.
After several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, in 1952, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life.He became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family.Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story Teddy features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights.He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in the story Hapworth 16, 1924, the character of Seymour Glass describes him as one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century.
In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker (Bananafish among them), as well as two that the magazine 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 Salinger's best-known stories.The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—remarkably so for a volume of short stories, according to Hamilton.Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.Already tightening his grip on publicity, though, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.
As the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from an apartment at 300 East 57th Street,New York, to Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time at Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students at Windsor High School. Salinger invited them to his house frequently to play records and talk about problems at school.One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper. However, after Blaney's interview appeared prominently in the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all contact with the high schoolers without explanation.He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.He also began to publish with less frequency. After the 1953 publication of Nine Stories, he published only four stories through the rest of the decade; two in 1955 and one each in 1957 and 1959.
Marriage and family
In June 1955, at the age of 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student (her father was the art critic Robert Langton Douglas). They had two children, Margaret (b. December 10, 1955) and Matthew (b. February 13, 1960). Margaret Salinger wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, had her father not read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the householder (a married person with children).[86] After their marriage, J.D. and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya yoga in a small store-front Hindu temple in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1955.They received a mantra and breathing exercises to practice for ten minutes twice a day.
Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she did. Certain elements of the story Franny, published in January 1955, are based on his relationship with Claire, including her ownership of the book The Way of the Pilgrim.[88] Because of their isolated location and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated by Salinger's ever-changing religious beliefs. Though she committed herself to Kriya yoga, she remembered that Salinger would chronically leave Cornish to work on a story for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone or destroyed and some new 'ism' we had to follow.Claire believed it was to cover the fact that Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn't face the quality of, or couldn't face publishing, what he had created.
After abandoning Kriya yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), even meeting its founder L. Ron Hubbard, but according to Claire he was quickly disenchanted with it.This was followed by an adherence to a number of spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems including an interest in Christian Science, Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, acupuncture, and macrobiotics.
Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after the first child was born; according to Margaret, Claire felt that her daughter had replaced her in Salinger's affections.The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but Salinger, having embraced the tenets of Christian Science, refused to take her to a doctor.According to Margaret, her mother admitted to her years later that she went over the edge in the winter of 1957 and had made plans to murder her 13-month-old infant and then commit suicide. Claire had intended to do it during a trip to New York City with Salinger, but she instead acted on a sudden impulse to take Margaret from the hotel and run away. After a few months, Salinger persuaded her to return to Cornish.
Last publications and Maynard relationship
Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction in 1963. Each book contained two short stories or novellas, previously published in The New Yorker, about members of the Glass family. These four stories were originally published between 1955 and 1959, and were the only ones Salinger had published since Nine Stories. On the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference to his interest in privacy It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.
On September 15, 1961, Time magazine devoted its cover to Salinger. In an article that profiled his life of recluse, the magazine reported that the Glass family series is nowhere near completion ... Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy.[4] However, Salinger published only one other story after that Hapworth 16, 1924, a novella in the form of a long letter from seven-year-old Seymour Glass while at summer camp. His first new work in six years, the novella took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker, and was universally critically panned. Around this time, Salinger had isolated Claire from friends and relatives and made her—in the words of Margaret Salinger—a virtual prisoner.[89] Claire separated from him in September 1966; their divorce was finalized on October 3, 1967.
In 1972, at the age of 53, Salinger had a relationship with 18-year-old Joyce Maynard that lasted for nine months. Maynard, at this time, was 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. Salinger wrote a letter to her warning about living with fame. After exchanging 25 letters, Maynard moved in with Salinger the summer after her freshman year at Yale University.Maynard did not return to Yale that fall, and spent ten months as a guest in Salinger's Cornish home. The relationship ended, he told his daughter Margaret at a family outing, because Maynard wanted children, and he felt he was too old.
However, in her own autobiography, Maynard paints a different picture, saying Salinger abruptly ended the relationship and refused to take her back. She had dropped out of Yale to be with him, even forgoing a scholarship. Maynard later writes in her own memoir how she came to find out that Salinger had begun relationships with young women by exchanging letters. One of those letter recipients included Salinger's last wife, a nurse who was already engaged to be married to someone else when she met the author.
While he was living with Maynard, Salinger continued to write in a disciplined fashion, a few hours every morning. According to Maynard, by 1972 he had completed two new novels.In a rare 1974 interview with The New York Times, he explained There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.According to Maynard, he saw publication as a damned interruption.In her memoir, Margaret Salinger describes the detailed filing system her father had for his unpublished manuscripts A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.A neighbor said that Salinger told him that he had written 15 unpublished novels.
Salinger's final interview was in June 1980 with Betty Eppes of The Baton Rouge Advocate. Eppes was an attractive young woman who misrepresented herself as an aspiring novelist, and managed to record audio of the interview as well as take several photographs of Salinger, both without his knowledge or consent. The interview ended disastrously when a local passer-by from Cornish attempted to shake the famous author's hand, at which point Salinger became enraged.A sordid account of the interview was later published by Eppes in The Paris Review.
