J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature's most famous recluses, who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel "The Catcher in the Rye," died Wednesday. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger died of natural causes at his home in Cornish, N.H., his son Matthew said in a statement from the author's longtime literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, which made the announcement on behalf of Mr. Salinger's family.
Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and critical interest as Mr. Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized collections of short stories and an additional 21 stories that appeared in magazines only in the 1940s. He abandoned publishing in 1965, when his last story - "Hapworth 26, 1924" - was published by the New Yorker. Rarely seen in public and aggressively averse to most publicity, he was often called the Howard Hughes of American letters.
His silence inspired a range of reactions from literary critics, some characterizing it as a form of cowardice and others as a cunning strategy that, despite its outward intentions, helped preserve his mythic status in American culture
Mr. Salinger's stories - heavily autobiographical, humorous and cynical - focused on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking meaning in a world transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which he was a direct participant.
His stellar fictional creation was Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero of "The Catcher in the Rye," who was, like Mr. Salinger, unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world he perceived as disingenuous and hostile to his needs.
A prototypical misfit, Caulfield apparently became a fixation for the criminally disturbed, including Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan. But Caulfield also cared about children and other innocents, exhibiting moral outrage and a compassion for underdogs that resonated with the generation that came of age in the 1960s.
Tom Hayden, the former '60s radical and California legislator who read "Catcher" as a teenager, called Caulfield one of several "alternative cultural models," along with novelists Jack Kerouac and actor James Dean, whose life crises "spawned not only political activism, but also the cultural revolution of rock and roll."
"Catcher" began to appear on college reading lists in the 1960s along with Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," but critic John Seelye, among others, would later conclude that in "acting as a transcendental Special Prosecutor of Adult Values and making straight the way for the protest movements of the '60s," Mr. Salinger led the way.
In the ensuing decades, "Catcher" became one of the most banned and most taught books in the country. Mr. Salinger also created the neurotic Glass family, who first appeared in stories published in the 1940s and '50s. Among the best known are two long pieces published in the New Yorker in the 1950s and later combined in the book "Franny and Zooey" by Little, Brown in 1961. The Glasses also were featured in the collections "Nine Stories" (1953) and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction" (1963).
An unauthorized collection, "The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger," was mysteriously published in 1974 and went out of print after some 25,000 copies were sold. It contained 21 pieces that originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s but that Mr. Salinger never wanted reprinted. The bootlegged edition so outraged the author that he broke two decades of silence when he sued to stop its sale.
In a rare interview, Mr. Salinger not only condemned the pirating but tried to explain his extraordinary reluctance to share his writing with readers.
"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," he told The New York Times in 1974. "It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." In 1997, the announcement by a small literary press that it would reprint his last work - the novella-length "Hapworth 16, 1924, " which was originally published in 1965 - caused excitement among a legion of hungry Salinger devotees. But the book never materialized, its cancellation as mysterious as the author who had led a hermitic life on a 99-acre estate in New Hampshire since 1953.
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day, 1919. His Scotch-Irish mother, Marie Jillich, changed her name to Miriam when she married Sol Salinger, a well-to-do importer of meats and cheeses. Jerome, known as Sonny, and his sister, Doris, eight years older, grew up on the fashionable East Side of Manhattan.
Sonny attended several public schools and the private McBurney School, racking up poor grades at all of them. According to biographer Paul Alexander, McBurney officials offered this withering appraisal when they kicked him out: "Character: Rather hard-hit by [adolescence] his last year with us. Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word."
In desperation, his father sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. It was there, holding a flashlight under the covers of his dormitory bed, that Mr. Salinger first began to write. His grades improved, and in 1936 Valley Forge awarded him what was to be his only diploma.
In April 1942, five months after Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Mr. Salinger joined the Army but did not stop writing. He carried his typewriter all over Europe, reportedly even taking it with him into foxholes, and had several stories published in the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1944, Mr. Salinger, who was serving in counterintelligence, landed with the 4th Infantry Division at Normandy on D-Day and stayed on through some of the war's bloodiest campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge. According to unauthorized biographer Ian Hamilton, the young writer might have experienced a nervous breakdown in July 1945, after fighting for nearly a year during the advance on Berlin. He was hospitalized in Nuremberg, where he wrote to his new friend, Ernest Hemingway, that he faced the possibility of a psychiatric discharge; he was presumed to have earned a regular discharge before returning to civilian life in November of that year.
Stories that Mr. Salinger published around this time concerned soldiers on the verge of emotional collapse, including the first story narrated by Holden Caulfield. Published in Colliers in December 1945, it was titled "I'm Crazy." Just before he left the Army, Mr. Salinger married a French woman named Sylvia, about whom little is known. She was thought to be a doctor with Nazi ties who, according to the author's daughter, Margaret Salinger, "hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis." The eight-month marriage ended in mid-1946 during a vacation in Florida, in a hotel much like the one Mr. Salinger would describe two years later in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Considered one of his finest stories, it features the sage but mentally fragile Seymour Glass, who is just released from an Army hospital and on holiday in Florida with his bride, and ends in an inexplicable tragedy.
The same year that his marriage ended, Mr. Salinger got news that the New Yorker had finally decided to publish a story of his that it had been holding for five years. The main character of "Slight Rebellion Off Madison Avenue" was Caulfield, again in the middle of a nervous breakdown. "Slight Rebellion" later became the basis for a chapter in "The Catcher in the Rye."
Mr. Salinger was tall (more than 6 feet) and darkly handsome. He married his second wife, Claire Douglas, in 1955, when she was a 19-year-old Radcliffe student and he was a rising literary star of 34. They had two children: Margaret Ann, born in 1955, and Matthew, born in 1960.
Besides his son, daughter and three grandchildren, Mr. Salinger is survived by his third wife, Colleen O'Neill, whom he was believed to have married in the late 1980s. Little is known about her except that she had worked as a nurse and was about 50 years younger than Salinger.
Novelist Herbert Gold once asked to reprint one of Mr. Salinger's stories in an anthology. Mr. Salinger wrote back, Mr. Gold recounted in the 2002 book "Letters to J.D. Salinger," edited by Chris Kubica and Will Hochman. His answer was no.
Mr. Gold lost the letter but 40 years later still recalled Mr. Salinger's enigmatic last words on refusing a place in the anthology:
"I have my reasons."
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