Author J.D. Salinger Dead at 91
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J.D. Salinger, best known for his 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, died yesterday at the age of 91. According to Salinger’s son, the author died of natural causes. He had lived a reclusive life in Cornish, New Hampshire, since the 1960s.
Salinger wrote one novel and three short story collections, including Nine Stories and Franny and Zoey, but it was Catcher in the Rye that propelled him to fame. The novel, which chronicles the adventures of rebellious teenager Holden Caulfield, was—and remains, in many ways—the quintessential coming-of-age novel and continues to be referenced in popular culture today.
According to the Associated Press:
“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 – 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 – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams – 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.
Holden Caulfield and Catcher in the Rye made Salinger famous, but his life as a hermit was also central to the author’s identity. Time’s Richard Lacayo calls Salinger the “hermit crab of American letters,” saying, “When he emerged it was usually to complain that somebody was poking at his shell. Over time Salinger’s exemplary refusal of his own fame may turn out to be as important as his fiction. In the 1960s he retreated to a small house in Cornish, N.H., and rejected the whole idea of being a public figure.”
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[...] how influential was J.D. Salinger, who died yesterday? The almost instant response online is pretty [...]
So Sad! My favorite book would never have existed without Catcher in the Rye.
From King Dork by Frank Portman:
“Oh wait: I should mention that The Catcher in the Rye is this book from the fifties.
It is every teacher’s favorite book. The main guy is a kind of misfit kid superhero named Holden Caulfield. For teachers, he is the ultimate guy, a real dreamboat. They love him to pieces. They all want to have sex with him, and with the book’s author, too, and they’d probably even try to do it with the book itself if they could figure out a way to go about it. It changed their lives when they were young. As kids, they carried it with them everywhere they went. They solemnly resolved that, when they grew up, they would dedicate their lives to spreading The Word.
It’s kind of like a cult.
They live for making you read it. When you do read it you can feel them all standing behind you in a semi-circle wearing black robes with hoods, holding candles. They’re chanting “Holden, Holden, Holden…” And they’re looking over your shoulder with these expectant smiles, wishing they were the ones discovering the earth-shattering joys of Catcher in the Rye for the very first time.”
<3
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