About Salinger

American novelist and short story writer, Salinger published one novel and several short story collections between 1948-59. His best-known work is THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951), a story about a rebellious teenage schoolboy and his impulsive experiences in New York City.

J.D. Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan. He was the son of a prosperous Jewish importer of Kosher cheese and his Scotch-Irish wife. In his childhood the young Jerome was called, Sonny. The family had a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue. After restless studies in prep schools, he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy (1934-36), which he attended briefly.

His friends from this period remember his sarcastic wit. In 1937 when he was eighteen and nineteen, Salinger spent five months in Europe. From 1937 to 1938 he studied at Ursinus College and New York University. He fell in love with Oona O'Neill, wrote her letters almost daily, and was later shocked when she married Charles Chaplin, who was much older than she.

In 1939 Salinger took a class in short story writing at Columbia University under Whit Burnett, founder-editor of the Story Magazine. During World War II he was drafted into the infantry and was involved in the invasion of Normandy. Salinger's comrades considered him very brave, a genuine hero. During the first months in Europe, Salinger managed to write stories and in Paris meet Ernest Hemingway. He was also involved in one of the bloodiest episodes of the war where he witnessed the horrors of war.

In his celebrated story 'For Esmé - With Love and Squalor' Salinger depicted a fatigued American soldier. He starts a correspondence with a thirteen-year-old British girl, which helps him to get a grip of life again. Salinger himself was hospitalized for stress according to his biographer Ian Hamilton. After serving in the Army Signal Corps and Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1942 to 1946, he devoted himself to writing. He played poker with other aspiring writers, but was considered a sour character who won all the time. He considered Hemingway and Steinbeck second rate writers but praised Melville.

In 1945 Salinger married a French woman named Sylvia - she was a doctor. They were later divorced and in 1955 Salinger married Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langton Douglas. The marriage ended in divorce in 1967, when Salinger's retreat into his private world and Zen Buddhism only increased.

Salinger's first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, became immediately a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and won huge international acclaim. It sells still some 250 000 copies annually. Salinger did not do much to help publicity, and asked that his photograph should not be used in connection with the book. Later he has turned down requests for movie adaptations of the book.

From time to time rumors spread that Salinger will publish another novel, or that he is publishing his work under a pseudonym, perhaps such as Thomas Pynchon. Journalists have assumed that because he doesn't give interviews, he has something to hide. In 1961 Time Magazine sent a team of reporters to investigate his private life. "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure," said Salinger in 1974 to a New York Times correspondent. However, according to Joyce Maynard, who was close to the author for a long time from the 1970s, Salinger still writes, but nobody is allowed to see the work. Maynard was eighteen when she received a letter from the author, and after an intense correspondence she moved in with him.

Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography of Salinger was rewritten, when the author did not accept extensive quoting of his personal letters. The new version, In Search of J.D. Salinger, appeared in 1988. In 1992 a fire broke out in Salinger's Cornish house, but he managed to flee from the reporters who saw an opportunity to interview him. Since the late 80s Salinger has been married to Colleen O'Neill. Maynard's story of her relationship with Salinger, At Home in the World, appeared in October 1998. Salinger broke his silence through his lawyers in 2009, when they launched a legal action to stop the publication of an unauthorized sequel to the Caulfield's story, entitled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye released in Britain under the pseudonym John David California.

Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.