J.D. Salinger, ’The Catcher in the Rye’ Author, Dies

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J.D. Salinger, ’The Catcher in the Rye’ Author, Dies at 91
January 28, 2010
By Nancy Moran

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author whose 1951 novel “The Catcher in the Rye” captured the pain of teenage angst and became a fixture of U.S. high school English courses, died today. He was 91.

Salinger’s son, speaking on behalf of the family and through the Harold Ober literary agency, said the author died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire.

Salinger was known almost as much for his hermitic lifestyle as his only full-length novel and its emblematic protagonist, Holden Caulfield. In 1953, he withdrew to a farm in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, and limited his contact with the literary world. He hadn’t published a story since 1965.

“He was famous for not wanting to be famous,” wrote the late British biographer Ian Hamilton in his 1988 book, “In Search of J.D. Salinger.”

Still, fans and journalists sought out Salinger over the decades in letters and trips to New Hampshire. His last-known interview was in 1980 with Betty Eppes, a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate whose quest to meet the author was turned into a feature for the Paris Review.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” told in the slang-filled narrative of the troubled 16-year-old prep-school student Caulfield, turned Salinger into an American literary star. The novel marked a break from fictional depictions of youth that eschewed themes of self, sexuality and alienation and is credited with jump-starting the so-called Beat Generation of writers including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

Best Seller

Mark David Chapman was carrying a copy of the book when he shot and killed Beatle John Lennon outside the singer’s Manhattan residence, the Dakota, in December 1980.

Salinger published more than two dozen short stories and novellas, but none gained the critical acclaim of “The Catcher in the Rye.” The book remains in the top 10 of best-selling works of classic fiction on Amazon.com’s Web site.

Salinger’s plan in the late 1990s to turn his last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” from a 1965 edition of the New Yorker magazine, into book form never materialized.

Jerome David Salinger was born on New Year’s Day, 1919, in New York, the only son of a food importer, Solomon Salinger. His mother, Miriam, was of Scotch-Irish decent and he had an older sister, Doris.

In 1934, Salinger was enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, by his father after having spent two years at the private McBurney School in Manhattan. He was an average student, a member of the school’s drama club and editor of the class of 1936’s yearbook, according to Hamilton. He later studied at New York University.

Learning to Write

After traveling to Europe to learn his father’s business, he attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and took an evening writing course at Columbia University in New York. He never received a degree.

His first work, “The Young Folks,” a vignette of awkward young adults at a party, appeared in 1940 in Story magazine, which was published by Columbia instructor and editor Whit Burnett.

He dated Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, in the early 1940s. Their relationship ended when O’Neill moved to Los Angeles and married Charlie Chaplin.

Salinger entered the U.S. Army during World War II and was made a staff sergeant before joining the Counter Intelligence Corps. His infantry regiment landed on Utah Beach on “D-Day,” June 6, 1944, and he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. While with his regiment in Paris, he met Ernest Hemingway.

Effects of War

At war’s end, he was hospitalized for stress in Germany. After being discharged in November 1945, he remained in the country for six months as a civilian contractor, according to Hamilton.

His wartime experience provided the background for several of his fictional characters, including the psychologically scarred American soldier and narrator of his 1950 story “For Esme--with Love and Squalor.”

Little is known about Salinger’s first marriage, believed to be to a European woman he met while in the service. He had two children, Margaret Ann and Matthew, by second wife Claire Douglas, a 19-year-old Radcliffe student he married in the mid- 1950s. They divorced in 1967.

In 1972, Salinger wrote to 18-year-old author Joyce Maynard after reading her front-page New York Times Magazine article, “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” an account of coming of age in the 1960s. Maynard dropped out of Yale University to move in with the 53-year-old writer, whom she affectionately called “Jerry.”

‘Moody and Cranky’

In 1998, she published “At Home in the World,” a memoir of their 10-month relationship before he sent her away when she sought to have a baby. Maynard described Salinger, who had been influenced by Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, as consumed with yoga, meditation, and a strict diet of whole grains and vegetables. She also said he could be “moody and cranky” and critical of her “worldly” habits, including her desire to publish and give interviews.

A year later she auctioned off his letters at Sotheby’s for more than $156,000 to help pay for her children’s college education. The successful bidder, software publisher Peter Norton, offered to return the letters to Salinger.

Salinger was married a third time to Colleen O’Neill, a woman he met in New Hampshire, in the late 1980s.

The majority of Salinger’s stories surrounded the fictional Caulfield and Glass families. “I’m Crazy,” published in Collier’s in 1945 and 1946’s “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” his New Yorker debut, introduced the character of Holden Caulfield. Two years later, the New Yorker published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which World War II veteran Seymour Glass commits suicide in a Florida hotel room while his wife is asleep.

Prolific Period

Salinger’s stories also appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle and Esquire magazines.

His 1948 wartime romance, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” was made into the 1949 movie “My Foolish Heart,” starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward. Afterwards, Salinger vowed never to let another of his works be turned into a film.

In 1953, he published “Nine Stories,” a collection that included “Bananafish” and other stories from the New Yorker. “Franny and Zooey” combined separate stories about the youngest of the seven Glass siblings into book form in 1961. “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” published in 1963, combined two New Yorker stories and is narrated by Seymour’s brother, Buddy.

Holden Caulfield’s Descent

In 1965, the New Yorker published “Hapworth 16, 1924,” with a seven-year-old Seymour Glass writing a letter home from summer camp.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” which took its title from the Robert Burns’s poem “Comin’ Thro the Rye,” follows Caulfield’s descent into depression and institutionalization while fantasizing about catching and preventing children playing in a large field of rye from falling off a cliff.

“That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy,” the character tells his sister, Phoebe, after being kicked out of his fourth school, Pencey Prep.

The tale of lost innocence and alienation opened up a literary debate over whether Caulfield, in his struggle against society’s “phonies,” was inspired by Salinger’s own private- school experience and sense of disillusionment.

The novel continues to stir controversy today over its use of language -- “goddam” is repeated throughout -- and content including underage drinking and Caulfield’s hiring of a prostitute. Some U.S. schools have banned the book.

Court Case

Author Ian Hamilton’s attempt to shed light on one of the literary world’s most-reclusive figures was thwarted by a federal appeals court. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court let the decision stand.

Hamilton, who sought to quote unpublished Salinger letters stored at university libraries for a conventional biography, reverted to writing a “literary adventure story” instead, “In Search of J.D. Salinger.”

In 2000, Salinger’s estranged daughter Margaret wrote the memoir “Dream Catcher.” In it, she described a neurotic father obsessed with health fads, including homeopathy and the drinking of his own urine. Her bid a year later to sell 32 letters from the author at Sotheby’s failed.

Salinger’s last legal challenge came in June of 2009 when he sued to block the publication of a sequel to his famous novel titled, “60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye.” The following month, a federal judge blocked author Fredrik Colting and Windupbird Publishing Ltd. from releasing the book in a preliminary injunction, ruling that it borrowed “quite extensively” from the original and didn’t qualify as a parody.

J.D. Salinger is survived by his wife, daughter Margaret, son Matthew, and three grandchildren.

--With assistance from Victoria Slind-Flor. Editors: James Greiff, Steven Gittelson.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nancy Moran in New York at +1-212-617-2331 or nmoran@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Greiff at +1-212-617-5801 or jgreiff@bloomberg.net.