J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger (/ˈsælɪndʒər/ SAL-in-jər; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II.[1] In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.[2][3]
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger
January 1, 1919
New York City, U.S.
January 27, 2010 (aged 91)
Cornish, New Hampshire, U.S.
- Novelist
- short-story writer
-
Sylvia Welter(m. 1945; div. 1947)
-
Claire Douglas(m. 1955; div. 1967)
-
Colleen O'Neill(m. 1988)
2, including Matt
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was an immediate popular success; Salinger's depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence was influential, especially among adolescent readers.[4] The novel was widely read and controversial,[a] and its success led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); Franny and Zooey (1961), a volume containing a novella and a short story; and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Salinger's last published work, the novella 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 his daughter, Margaret Salinger.
World War II[edit]
In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding her immeasurably 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.[27] Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married.[28] In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly a performer.[29]
The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. The magazine rejected seven of his stories that year, including "Lunch for Three," "Monologue for a Watery Highball," and "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler." But in December 1941, it accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters".[30] When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered "unpublishable." Salinger was devastated. The story appeared in The New Yorker in 1946, after the war ended.[30]
In the spring of 1942, several months after the U.S. entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the army, where he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.[29] He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.[31][15]
During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was then working as a war correspondent in Paris.[32] Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona.[33] Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent."[4] The two began corresponding; Salinger wrote to Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war,[33] and added that he was working on a play about Caulfield and hoped to play the part himself.[33]
Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit also known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war.[34] In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant[35] and served in five campaigns.[36] His war experiences affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated,[37][38] and later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."[34] Both his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,[39] such as "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor", which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, publishing 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, including a group of 15 poems in 1945.[30]
Postwar years[edit]
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "Denazification" duty in Germany[40] for the Counterintelligence Corps. He lived in Weißenburg and, soon after, married 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.[41] 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."[42]
In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint.[43] The collection, The Young Folks, was to consist of 20 stories—ten, like the title story and "Slight Rebellion off Madison", already in print and ten previously unpublished.[43] Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book.[43] Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.[44]
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"[4] and arranged a meeting with Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki.
In 1947, Salinger submitted a short story, "The Bananafish", to The New Yorker. William Maxwell, the magazine's fiction editor, was impressed enough with "the singular quality of the story" that the magazine asked Salinger to continue revising it. He spent a year reworking it with New Yorker editors and the magazine published it, now titled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", in the January 31, 1948, issue. The magazine thereon offered Salinger a "first-look" contract that allowed it right of first refusal on any future stories.[45] 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.[46] "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.[47] Salinger published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.[47]
In the early 1940s, Salinger confided in a letter to Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories to achieve financial security.[48] 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."[48] Though Salinger sold the story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it "would make a good movie",[49] critics lambasted the film upon its release in 1949.[50] Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the film departed to such an extent from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg called it a "bastardization."[50] As a result of this experience, Salinger never again permitted film adaptations of his work.[51] When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", Salinger refused, 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."[52]
Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish[edit]
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. He replied, "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" (although O'Casey was in fact alive at the time).[73] In letters from the 1940s, Salinger expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;[74] Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor".[75] Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald's story "May Day."[76]
Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna.[77] 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.[78][79] Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story "Teddy" features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights.[80] He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in "Hapworth 16, 1924", Seymour Glass calls him "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century."[78]
In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker (including "Bananafish"), as well as two 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.[81] The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—"remarkably so for a volume of short stories," according to Hamilton.[82] Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.[82] Already tightening his grip on publicity, 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 Catcher in the Rye's notability grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from an apartment at 300 East 57th Street,[83] 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.[84] One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper. After the interview appeared prominently in the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all contact with the high schoolers without explanation.[84] He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.[85] He also began to publish less often. After Nine Stories, he published only four stories in the rest of the decade, two in 1955 and one each in 1957 and 1959.
Second marriage, family, and spiritual beliefs[edit]
In February 1955, at age 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas (b. 1933), a Radcliffe student who was art critic Robert Langton Douglas's daughter. They had two children, Margaret Salinger (also known as Peggy – born December 10, 1955) and Matthew "Matt" Salinger (born 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, Salinger 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.[87] They received a mantra and breathing exercise to practice for ten minutes twice a day.[87]
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 in Cornish 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, Salinger chronically left 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."[89] 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."[89]
After abandoning Kriya yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), even meeting its founder L. Ron Hubbard, but according to Claire was quickly disenchanted with it.[89][90] This was followed by an adherence to a number of spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems, including Christian Science, Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics,[91] and, like a number of other writers in the 1960s, Sufism.[92]
Salinger's family life was further marked by discord after his first child was born; according to Margaret's book, Claire felt that her daughter had replaced her in Salinger's affections.[93] The infant Margaret was sick much of the time, but Salinger, having embraced Christian Science, refused to take her to a doctor.[94] 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 and then commit suicide. Claire had supposedly 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.[94]
The Salingers divorced in 1967, with Claire getting custody of the children.[95] Salinger remained close to his family.[96] He built a new house for himself across the road and visited frequently;[96] he continued to live there until his death in 2010.
Posthumous publications[edit]
Salinger wrote all his life. His widow and son began preparing this work for publication after his death, announcing in 2019 that "all of what he wrote will at some point be shared" but that it was a major undertaking and not yet ready.[142][143] In 2023, his son estimated that he would finish transcribing Salinger's notes in "a year or two", and reiterated that "all the unpublished material will be published, but it is a complicated task."[144][145]
Literary style and themes[edit]
In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote, "I almost always write about very young people", a statement that has been called his credo.[146] Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940), to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world."[147] For this reason, Norman Mailer once remarked that Salinger was "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school."[148] Salinger's language, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were published and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work.[149]
Salinger identified closely with his characters,[107] and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue.
Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large",[150] the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults,[150] and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.[39]
Contemporary critics discuss a clear progression over the course of Salinger's published work, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews each of his three post-Catcher story collections received.[139][151] Hamilton adheres to this view, arguing that while Salinger's early stories for the "slicks" boasted "tight, energetic" dialogue, they had also been formulaic and sentimental. It took the standards of The New Yorker editors, among them William Shawn, to refine his writing into the "spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld" qualities of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), The Catcher in the Rye, and his stories of the early 1950s.[152] By the late 1950s, as Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and parenthetical remarks.[153] Louis Menand agrees, writing in The New Yorker that Salinger "stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense ... He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control."[39] In recent years, some critics have defended certain post-Nine Stories works by Salinger; in 2001, Janet Malcolm wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Zooey" "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece ... Rereading it and its companion piece 'Franny' is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby."[139]
Influence[edit]
Salinger's writing has influenced several prominent writers, prompting Harold Brodkey (an O. Henry Award-winning author) to say in 1991, "His is the most influential body of work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway."[154] Of the writers in Salinger's generation, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike, attested that "the short stories of J. D. Salinger really opened my eyes as to how you can weave fiction out of a set of events that seem almost unconnected, or very lightly connected ... [Reading Salinger] stick[s] in my mind as really having moved me a step up, as it were, toward knowing how to handle my own material."[155] Menand has observed that the early stories of Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth were affected by "Salinger's voice and comic timing".[39]
National Book Award finalist Richard Yates told The New York Times in 1977 that reading Salinger's stories for the first time was a landmark experience, and that "nothing quite like it has happened to me since".[156] Yates called Salinger "a man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled, and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word." Gordon Lish's O. Henry Award-winning short story "For Jeromé—With Love and Kisses" (1977, collected in What I Know So Far, 1984) is a play on Salinger's "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor".[157][158]
In 2001, Menand wrote in The New Yorker that "Catcher in the Rye rewrites" among each new generation had become "a literary genre all its own".[39] He classed among them Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Writer Aimee Bender was struggling with her first short stories when a friend gave her a copy of Nine Stories; inspired, she later described Salinger's effect on writers, explaining: "[I]t feels like Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a day, and that incredible feeling of ease inspires writing. Inspires the pursuit of voice. Not his voice. My voice. Your voice."[159] Authors such as Stephen Chbosky,[160] Jonathan Safran Foer,[161] Carl Hiaasen, Susan Minot,[162] Haruki Murakami, Gwendoline Riley,[163] Tom Robbins, Louis Sachar,[164] Joel Stein,[165] Leonardo Padura, and John Green have cited Salinger as an influence. Musician Tomas Kalnoky of Streetlight Manifesto also cites Salinger as an influence, referencing him and Holden Caulfield in the song "Here's to Life". Biographer Paul Alexander called Salinger "the Greta Garbo of literature".[166]