J. D. Salinger

American short-story writer

• Born: January 1, 1919
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 27, 2010
• Place of death: Cornish, New Hampshire

Although Salinger wrote only one novel and thirty-five stories, he attained a degree of international recognition and popularity that was unequaled by most twentieth century American authors.

Early Life

J. D. Salinger (SAL-ihn-jur) was born Jerome David Salinger in Manhattan, the setting (or focal point) for most of his best fiction. He was the second child and only son of Sol Salinger and Marie Jillich Salinger. His paternal grandfather, Simon, born in Lithuania, was at one time the rabbi for the Adath Jeshurun congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. His mother, reared a Christian, converted to Judaism on marrying Sol and changed her name to Miriam. Salinger’s father, an importer of meat (hams from Poland in particular), was a highly successful businessman. The family lived on the fashionable Riverside Drive during Salinger’s early years. The Salingers were not conventionally religious; the children were exposed primarily to the ideas of Ethical Culture. In 1930, young Salinger, or “Sonny” as he was called by his family, spent the summer at Camp Wigwam in Harrison, Maine (the probable source for the setting of his last published story).

Salinger attended Manhattan public schools until, at age thirteen, he was enrolled in the McBurney School, also in Manhattan, where he earned below-average grades but became manager of the fencing team and was elected sophomore class president. In the fall of 1934, hoping for better academic performance from his son, Salinger’s father sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he participated in all the usual activities, was literary editor of the yearbook, and maintained about a B average.

After Salinger was graduated from Valley Forge in 1936, he attended the Washington Square campus of New York University. He took the following year off to travel with his father in Austria and Poland. While in Europe, Salinger learned German and familiarized himself with the family business. This experience led him back to academe, to Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1938. The columns that Salinger wrote for the Ursinus College newspaper reveal a very literary man most unhappy with college life. Salinger abruptly left Ursinus in December; his train voyage home to New York was perhaps the inspiration for a similar scene in The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

In the spring of 1938, Salinger enrolled in the Extension Division of Columbia University and attended Whit Burnett’s writing class. Within a year, his first story, “The Young Folks,” was published in Burnett’s Story magazine; another appeared in the University of Kansas City Review. In 1941, he cracked the slick magazines, with one story each in Collier’s and Esquire. Thereafter, for ten years or more, regardless of his life circumstances, Salinger regularly published stories in these and such other magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. Several of Salinger’s stories, even some of those written as early as 1941, concern a young man named Holden Caulfield, who would become the hero of Salinger’s first and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. That same year Salinger dated Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill; however, Salinger found her too self-absorbed, and the relationship soon ended. He also worked for a short time as an activity director on a cruise ship.

In the spring of 1942, Salinger was drafted into the United States Army, serving first in the Signal Corps and later in the Counter-Intelligence Corps, where he was assigned to the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division. He sailed with the latter for England in January of 1944. On D Day, Salinger, by then a staff sergeant, landed on Utah Beach with his regiment, five hours after the first assault. The fighting that Salinger witnessed provided the background for the story “For Esmé with Love and Squalor” (1950). It also sent him to a hospital for several weeks after the war to be treated for combat stress. In August of 1944, Salinger had a friendly meeting with Ernest Hemingway, in France. Until his discharge in the spring of 1946, Salinger’s duty was to interrogate captured German soldiers and French civilians. In 1945, he married a German psychiatrist, Sylvia, from whom he was divorced two years later.

In 1948, Salinger published one of his most highly regarded stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” After accepting it, The New Yorker editors were reportedly so impressed that the magazine offered Salinger a contract for first refusal rights on all future stories. About the same time Salinger became devoted to the teachings of Zen Buddhism, which were to influence many of his stories thereafter. (He later grew interested in Hinduism and other religious philosophies as well.) He had his first and only involvement with the film industry during this period. Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” and the resulting film, starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, came out in 1949 under the title My Foolish Heart. It changed Salinger’s story so thoroughly that thereafter he refused to allow film adaptations of his work.

For the next several years Salinger moved quite often; he lived first with his parents on Park Avenue, then in Westport, Connecticut, and finally in an apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan all the while writing stories, cruising around Greenwich Village in his sports car, and working on the final drafts of The Catcher in the Rye. This remarkable novel about the odyssey of a teenage boy spiritually lost in nighttime Manhattan was an immediate popular success. Salinger obligingly sat for interviewers and photographers. One particular picture of him the one that appeared on the dust jacket of the first printing of The Catcher in the Rye (and frequently elsewhere) became so well-known to the public that it became a kind of icon. It shows a handsome young man in three-quarters profile, with dark eyes in a slender and sensitive face and a mouth anticipating a possibly sad smile. The owner of this iconic face was six feet two inches tall and soon to be disillusioned about the rewards of popularity.

Life’s Work

The novel The Catcher in the Rye illustrates well the basic features of Salinger’s art. In his novel, as in most of his short stories, Salinger identifies with the concerns of young people who suffer from the hypocrisy of the adult world, and he effectively re-creates their speech. The book also contains numerous examples of Salinger’s distinctive humor often considered vulgar for which the book was banned from many libraries and school reading lists. Finally, in a plot development typical of Salinger’s fiction, the protagonist is transformed through spiritual insight, allowing him to accept, at least temporarily, the world as it is. The quest of many of Salinger’s protagonists is religious in character, usually containing elements both of Buddhism (recognition of the pain of life) and of Christianity (Holden, in his desire to protect the children in the field of rye, acting as a savior or Christ figure). Some critics found Salinger mannered, sentimental, and insufficiently interested in social questions. Still, readers around the world not merely in the United States identified strongly with Salinger’s adolescent protagonist. Many readers, together with numerous magazine reporters, sought out the young writer.

To escape from his fans, Salinger ordered his portrait removed from all later printings of The Catcher in the Rye, refused all requests for interviews, and finally, in January of 1953, retired from the world altogether by moving to a rustic cottage near Cornish Flat, New Hampshire located on a dirt road in the woods, about a mile from St. Gaudens Memorial Park. In the same year Salinger’s collection Nine Stories was published, notable for its chronicles of the Glass family, for its use of Zen Buddhist motifs, and for its remarkable “For Esmé with Love and Squalor,” a story that presents the agony of war, the Dostoevskian premise that hell is the suffering of being unable to love, and an offer of hope through love from a young girl in England to a battle-weary American sergeant.

Also in 1953, Salinger met nineteen-year-old Claire Alison Douglas at a party in Manchester, Vermont. An English debutante, she had studied at the best private schools and was then a top student at Radcliffe College. She was much influenced by Salinger’s religious preoccupations and became in part the model for Franny Glass, the protagonist of “Franny” (1955). Franny is memorable for her antipathy toward ambitious, egotistical English instructors and for her desperate effort to escape the pain of the world by endlessly repeating the Jesus Prayer of Russian Orthodoxy. Despite her attraction to Salinger, Douglas married (in August of 1953) her fiancé, Colman Mockler, a student at the Harvard Business School. Within a short time, however, this marriage was annulled. On February 17, 1955, Salinger and Douglas were married. On December 10 of that year their first child, Margaret Ann, was born, and on February 13, 1960, their second and last child, Matthew Robert, was born.

During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Salinger completed his cycle of Glass family stories, publishing two stories each in the books Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). In 1965, he published “Hapworth 16, 1924” in The New Yorker, consisting chiefly of a long letter home written from camp by Seymour Glass at the age of seven. This strange and precocious document would be the last new work of fiction published by Salinger.

In 1967, Salinger and Douglas divorced. The cottage was sold. When the children were grown, Douglas moved to San Francisco and established herself as a Jungian psychologist. Salinger continued to live in his hilltop chalet, writing daily and trying to avoid intrusive fans and reporters, who, once a year or so, invaded his retreat, hoping to engage him in conversation for a few minutes or at least catch a glimpse of him.

To some, Salinger’s withdrawal into almost total privacy seemed psychotic; he has not, however, completely isolated himself from society. For example, romantic interests have been reported in the press with the nineteen-year-old novelist Joyce Maynard in 1973 and with actress Elaine Joyce in 1982. In 1978, he attended a testimonial dinner in Queens, New York, for an old army buddy. In 1980 he granted his last formal interview. Six years later he again attracted public attention when he sued to stop British biographer Ian Hamilton from publishing In Search of J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life (1935-1965). At issue was Hamilton’s extensive use of letters that Salinger had sent to other writers and friends, which Salinger regarded as infringement of copyright. After court battles, the book was published in 1988 without direct quotations from the letters or paraphrases of them. During this time he married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse forty years younger than he.

As to what Salinger has written since 1965, Truman Capote reported shortly before he died: “I’m told, on very good authority, that . . . he’s written at least five or six short novels and that all of them have been turned down by The New Yorker. And that all of them are very strange and about Zen Buddhism.” In 1997 Salinger surprised many by allowing a small publishing house, Orchises Press, to reprint his 1965 short story “Hapworth 16, 1924”; however, the media excitement over the project caused Salinger to withdraw his support.

In 1992, Salinger entered the news when his home caught on fire, but his wife screened him from contact with the public and media. In 1997, Maynard refocused media attention on him one more time when she auctioned off letters that Salinger had written to her and the following year published At Home in the World: A Memoir, describing their relationship. His daughter Margaret likewise published a book about her father, Dream Catcher: A Memoir (2000). She speaks at length of the strict control Salinger exerted over her and her mother, and she also contradicts the thesis of earlier biographers that Salinger suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Soon after the book came out, Salinger’s son Matt published a letter discounting many of its claims. If Salinger could not stop such public exposure, he was yet able to exercise his animus against filmmakers more successfully. In 1998 he blocked a screening of Pani, an unauthorized Iranian adaptation of Franny and Zooey. Meanwhile, according to Margaret, Salinger continued to write in accordance with a disciplined schedule and has files of stories ready to be published when he dies.

Significance

Salinger’s major work, The Catcher in the Rye, had, by the late 1980’s, been translated into thirty-five languages and sold more than twelve million copies in English-language editions alone. (In the twenty-first century it still was among the ten most frequently challenged books in the United States because of its coarse language and attacks on conventional religion, according to the American Library Association.) Indeed, it is the income from such unprecedented sales that has allowed Salinger to live his monkish life and to write for himself alone, refusing to conform to the expectations of publishers. Foreign readers have found it easy to identify or sympathize with the sensitive Holden Caulfield. Russians in particular fell in love with the young protagonist. Many editions of The Catcher in the Rye (to say nothing of the stories) were published in the Soviet Union not only in Russian but also in other Soviet languages. (A Russian edition of Salinger’s collected works in one volume had a print run of fifty thousand copies as late as 1983.) In this way, Salinger has made an important contribution to international understanding and therefore to world peace. Indeed, The Catcher in the Rye has probably done more than any other American novel in part precisely because of the attacks on it by book censors to introduce young people to great literature.

Bibliography

Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance, 1999. Alexander relates the sparse biographical information available about Salinger (who did not cooperate with his research) based on interviews with others and New Yorker archives. He argues that Salinger’s seclusion is actually a ploy to enhance his reputation. Interesting if not particularly illuminating.

Alsen, Eberhard. Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1983. A fascinating summary and analysis of the Glass family stories. Includes a helpful chronology of events. Although little is said about Salinger’s own life, autobiographical elements in the Glass stories become apparent under Alsen’s treatment. Useful list of all the books that form the basis of Seymour’s (that is Salinger’s) eclectic religious philosophy.

Crawford, Catherine, ed. If You Really Want to Hear About It: Writers on J. D. Salinger and His Work. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006. A collection of reprinted articles, interviews, reviews, appreciations and excerpts about Salinger from others’ memoirs, and a newly published essay by Joyce Maynard.

French, Warren. J. D. Salinger. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Both critical and biographical. Has a useful chronology of Salinger’s life and work, updated from the 1963 edition, and a selected bibliography, also updated.

Grunwald, Henry Anatole, ed. Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. A good early collection of critical articles, most of them favorable to Salinger. A detailed “biographical collage” forms the first chapter.

Kubica, Chris, and Will Hochman, eds. Letters to J. D. Salinger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Approximately seventy letters addressed to Salinger by teenagers, teachers, and other writers, a testament to the enduring popularity of Holden Caulfield.

Laser, Marvin, and Norman Fruman, eds. Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of “The Catcher in the Rye” and Other Fiction. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. Balanced collection of critical articles that include incidental biographical information. A checklist of Salinger’s work is appended.

Lundquist, James. J. D. Salinger. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Excellent critical analysis of the fiction, with a chronology of life and work and an extensive bibliography.

Maynard, Joyce. At Home in the World: A Memoir. New York: Picador, 1998. This tell-all book reveals the author’s relationship with Salinger, a sharply slanted view of a sentimental recluse.

Salinger, Margaret. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000. Salinger’s dark depiction of her father’s treatment of her and her mother also contains information about his writing habits and love of films, which, she claims, are a guiding influence on his sensibility.