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'Catcher in the Rye' author J.D. Salinger dies
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
The reclusive writer who gave literary voice to the emotional and psychological anguish of teenagers throughout the world is gone.
J.D. Salinger, 91, author of the 1951 masterpiece Catcher in the Rye, died of natural causes at his longtime home in Cornish, N.H., said the author's son, in a statement from the author's literary representative.
Catcher in the Rye was the only Salinger novel released in his lifetime, but it is an acknowledged masterpiece and established the author as one of the most influential writers of the last century.
His carefully structured novel centered on an unhappy 16-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. Expelled from prep school, Caulfield narrates the story after an apparent mental breakdown.
More significantly, the novel was the first to capture the post-World War II alienation of youth: the idiomatic slang, the rage against the hypocrisy of the adult world and the fury at the inevitable loss of innocence that growing up demands. Holden's deepest feelings are for his little sister, Phoebe, and his dead brother, Allie, who died of leukemia.
Although published in the early 1950s, the book's themes foreshadowed the youthful rebellion of the 1960s. It remains controversial more than half a century later because of its sexual content, questioning of traditional ideals, and language.
Despite Caulfield's elite position in society, the book's central theme of adolescent anger continues to resonate with young readers around the world. There are more than 60 million copies of the 214-page novel in print worldwide.
Jerome David Salinger, born to a xxxish father and Irish mother on Jan. 1, 1919, grew up in New York City. He attended boarding school and later New York University and Columbia.
The future writer served in World War II as a soldier. His daughter, Margaret Salinger, writing in Dream Catcher, a memoir about her painful childhood and difficult relationship with her famous father, theorized that he may have been traumatized by the war.
By the time Margaret was born in 1956, Salinger had already begun to retreat from the firestorm of attention, praise, criticism and expectations that Catcher generated. In the early 1960s, he published three collections of short stories but stopped publishing altogether in 1965.
Still, rumors have long circulated that the intensely private Salinger had not stopped writing in the 1960s, only stop publishing.
Salinger lived in rural New Hampshire for many decades, never granting interviews.
He, however, had been known to read The New York Times Sunday Magazine. In 1973, the then-53-year-old author penned a letter to 18-year-old Joyce Maynard after she published a cover story in the magazine in 1973. A photo of the waif-like Maynard accompanied the piece. Her writing "aroused affection" in him, he wrote.
Salinger invited the Yale freshman to visit him. Maynard went, dropped out of college and spent a year with Salinger. But the affair ended badly and left her emotionally devastated. Maynard wrote about the relationship 25 years later in her autobiography, At Home In the World.
Maynard was pilloried for selling letters that Salinger had written to her — money she says she needed to pay for the college education of her three children. She forcefully defended herself against such criticism.
"It appears to be a matter of some dispute whether a woman has the right to tell the truth about her life," Maynard wrote. "And if she does, whether the story of a woman's life is viewed as significant or valuable."
Salinger also launched a successful legal challenge to a biography by Ian Hamilton, scheduled for publication in 1986. The book had to be reworked extensively after the courts ruled that it could not include direct quotes from Salinger's letters. Between his daughter's memoir, Maynard's autobiography and his own unrelenting legal attack on a respected biographer, Salinger's image as an exemplar of literary and intellectual rigor has taken some very serious hits.
Nonetheless, Salinger's writing remains brilliant, admired and most significantly, continues to speak to anguished adolescents throughout the world.
Salinger is survived by two children from his first marriage: writer Margaret and actor Matthew Salinger.
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