J.D. SALINGER (1919-2010)

1. J.D. SALINGER (1919-2010)

2. Early years Born Jerome David Salinger on January 1, 1919, in New York City, to Sol and Miriam Jillich Salinger. Had an older sister Doris (d. 2001). Raised Jewish (though, after his bar mitzvah, Salinger learned his mother was secretly Catholic). Father worked in the meat import business. At age 13, J.D. (known then as “Sonny”) attended the private McBurney School, where he captained the fencing team.

3. Young Adulthood At age 15, Salinger enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania—the inspiration for Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye. There, he worked on the newspaper and yearbook, until graduating in 1936. In 1937, Salinger entered NYU but exited within the year, taking a job on a cruise ship. 1938: Moved to Vienna to learn the meat-importation business, but had to leave just before Hitler invaded Austria. Returned to the US and studied at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania for one semester.

4. Breakthrough 1939: Took evening course at Columbia University. His writing teacher was Whit Burnett, longtime editor of the historic Story magazine. 1940: Burnett arranged the publication of Salinger’s first published story, “The Young Folks.” Over the next decade, 27 of Salinger’s short stories were published in magazines like The New Yorker, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, and, of course, Story.

5. Love and war 1941: Salinger began a relationship with Oona O’Neill, daughter of the great playwrightEugene O’Neill. 1942: Drafted into the Army. Wrote O’Neill lengthy, daily love letters (as long as ten pages).Unfortunately, Oona met the famous actor Charlie Chaplin, who swept her off her feet and married her within a year. Salinger developed a lifelong mistrust of actors.

6. Love and war (continued) Salinger landed at Utah Beach on D-Day and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, among other offensives. 1945: The war over, Salinger had a hospital stay of a few weeks for combat stress, then began “de-Nazification” duty in Germany. He became smitten with a low-level ex-Nazi named Sylvia and married her, but the marriage lasted only a few months and Salinger returned to the US in 1946.

7. Catcher in the Rye 1944: Began writing The Catcher in the Rye. 1946: Finished an initial version of Catcher, a 90-page “novelette.” Shortly after submitting the book to the publisher, he withdrew it to work on it further. 1951: Catcher is published and quickly climbs to #4 on the New York Times bestseller list. Selected by The Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1942, Salinger sold The New Yorker a story called “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.” The story included the character of Holden Caulfield. (The story was held from publication until 1946, due to the war.)

8. Controversy The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most frequently “challenged” (banned) books in US schools. It ranked #13 on the American Library Association’s list for 1990-2000 and #3 on the list for 2005 (reason given: “for sexual content, offensive language and being unsuited to age group”) The book continues to sell upwards of 250,000 copies each year. Mark David Chapman brought the book with him when he killed Beatle John Lennon: "The reason I killed John Lennon was to promote the reading of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.” He later recalled, “I left the hotel room, bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, signed it to Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield, and wrote underneath that ‘This is my statement,’ underlining the word ‘this,’ the emphasis on the word this. I had planned not to say anything after the shooting.” John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, also had a copy of Catcher among his personal effects.

9. Other Works 1961: Franny and Zooey. The “Glass cycle” deals with the extended Glass family. 1953: Nine Stories.

10. Other Works June 1965: “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Epistolary novella published in The New Yorker. 1963: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

11. Wives and kids 1953: Salinger moved to Cornish, New Hampshire. 1955: Married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student who he asked to drop out of school. They immediately had a daughter, Margaret. 1960: Son Matthew born. (Matt as Captain America) 1965: Divorce. 1972: Year-long “affair” with 18-year-old writer Joyce Maynard. Late ’80s/’90s: Married Colleen O’Neill, a nurse and quiltmaker 40 years his junior.

12. A recluse? Yes and no. Generally refused all interview requests since 1953. He spoke to the New York Times by phone in 1974 and in 1980 to reporter Betty Eppes of The Baton Rouge Advocate. He also shunned photographers, but was not a “recluse,” as he was often called. He reportedly traveled and had many friends. Though he published no new material after 1965, he continued to write. Several floor-to-ceiling safes contained manuscripts with express instructions as to how they will be published, posthumously. Newsweek reported in 1978 that Salinger had an unpublished novel, "a long, romantic book set in World War II.”A 1980s court case revealed that Salinger had at least two completed novels and numerous short stories completed. He was said to have a “bunker,” for the purpose of writing, on his property.

13. Variously followed Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, and Christian Science. • Refused to sell the film rights to any of his works, having been burned once by Hollywood (he hated My Foolish Heart, the 1949 film based on his story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”). • In 2009, Salinger successfully sued to stop the publication, sale and advertisement of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a novel written by an Swedish editor/author under the pseudonym J.D. California. Odds and ends Died January 27, 2010 of “natural causes.”

14. Quotations Of Holden Caulfield: “I know the boy I'm writing about so well. He deserves to be a novel.”(1943) “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. 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.” (Fosburgh, Lacy. “J.D. Salinger Speaks About His Silence.” New York Times 3 November 1974: 1.)

15. Quotations Betty Eppes recounting a 1980 conversation with Salinger: “He said, It’s all in the book. Read the book again, it’s all in there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.    So I asked, Well, does that mean he isn’t going to grow up – there won’t be a sequel?    He said, Read the book.    Every question I asked about Holden Caulfield he replied, Read the book. It’s all in the book. There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Over and over. Except when I asked him if the book was autobiographical. When I quoted to him what he had once said in that interview with the Windsor schoolgirl about his boyhood being like Holden’s, he seemed to be made very uncomfortable by that. He said, I don’t know…I don’t know. I’ve just let it all go. I don’t know about Holden any more.”(Eppes, Betty. “What I Did Last Summer.” The Paris Review 80 (1981).)

16. Works Cited “A Salinger Timeline.” 23 April 2006. 17 July 2006. <http://www.geocities.com/deadcaulfields/Timeline.html>. Eppes, Betty. “What I Did Last Summer.” The Paris Review 80 (1981). Fosburgh, Lacy. “J.D. Salinger Speaks About His Silence.” New York Times 3 November 1974: 1.) “J.D. Salinger.” 16 July 2006. 17 July 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jd_salinger>. Larry King Live Weekend: “A Look Back at Mark David Chapman in His Own Words.” 30 September 2000. 17 July 2006. <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0009/30/lklw.00.html>. Salinger, Margaret. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000. Wilson, Giles. “J D Salinger: A glimpse inside the life of a recluse.” 23 March 1999. 17 July 2006. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/301077.stm>. Challenged and Banned Books. 2006. 17 July 2006. <www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm#mfcb >.