J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Born Jerome David Salinger in Manhattan, New York City, on January 1, 1919, he came of age between the city’s private schools, a Pennsylvania military academy, and the literary magazines that helped define his early career. Before serving in World War II, he published short stories in Story magazine in 1940. After the war, The New Yorker became central to his career, beginning with the critically acclaimed “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in 1948 and continuing with much of his later work.

Salinger’s early life was marked by movement, uncertainty, and a feeling of not quite fitting in. His father, Sol Salinger, traded in kosher cheese and came from a Lithuanian-Jewish family from the Russian Empire; his mother, Marie, was born in Iowa of German, Irish, and Scottish descent and considered herself Jewish after marriage. As a boy, Salinger attended public schools on Manhattan’s West Side, then McBurney School after his family moved to Park Avenue. He managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper, and appeared in plays, though his father opposed the idea of acting. At Valley Forge Military Academy, he wrote stories at night under the covers with a flashlight and served as literary editor of the class yearbook.

His path to writing was not direct. He attended New York University, left after a year, and then, at his father’s urging, went to work in the meat-importing business in Vienna and Bydgoszcz, Poland. He was disgusted by the slaughterhouses, and that disgust, along with his rejection of his father’s plans, likely influenced his vegetarianism as an adult. After a brief stay at Ursinus College, he studied at Columbia University’s School of General Studies with Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine. Burnett accepted Salinger’s debut short story, “The Young Folks,” for publication in the March-April 1940 issue and became his mentor.

World War II shaped Salinger’s life and work. Drafted in early 1942, he served as a counterintelligence agent with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, he met Ernest Hemingway in Paris. Hemingway, then a war correspondent, was impressed by Salinger’s writing, and the two began corresponding. Salinger later wrote that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.

The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. Its depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence was influential, especially among adolescent readers, and the novel became both widely read and controversial. The attention it brought was difficult for Salinger. He became reclusive and published less often, though he followed the novel with Nine Stories in 1953, Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. His last published work, the novella “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

In later years, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the late-1990s publication of memoirs by his former lover Joyce Maynard and his daughter Margaret Salinger. He died of natural causes on January 27, 2010. His writing still speaks to readers because it gives plain, sharp form to feelings that can be hard to name: loneliness, rebellion, innocence, embarrassment, and the ache of growing up under other people’s eyes.