Background

Ethnicity: His Father was from a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent and his mother was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scottish descent.

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York City, United States, on January 1, 1919; the son of a cheese-seller, Sol Salinger and Marie (née Jillich) Salinger. J.D. Salinger was the youngest of two children. His only sibling was his older sister Doris.

Education

Salinger had been educated at public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, before 1932, when he was enrolled at the McBurney School. Being Jewish, Salinger had trouble fitting in at his school environment and took measures to conform, like using his first name, Jerry, instead of his Jewish name, David. At school, the young boy displayed an innate talent for literature, acting, and fencing.

His parents then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, which he graduated in 1936. Salinger then entered New York University with a focus on studying special education, but dropped out the following spring.

In 1938, Salinger entered Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, but again dropped out after one semester. In 1939, Salinger attended the Columbia University School of General Studies, where he took a writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine, and it was in the magazine Story, founded and edited by Burnett, that Salinger published his first story, "The Young Folks," in the spring of 1940. Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded for several years.

Career

When the United States entered World War II, Salinger volunteered for service but was initially rejected because of a mild heart complaint. In the spring of 1942, however, he was reclassified and drafted into the army where he served until the end of the war. Salinger was stationed at several training centers around the country before going overseas in 1944. He trained with the Counter-Intelligence Corps in England and participated in the Normandy campaign and the liberation of France. Although he had applied for a commission, he never rose above the rank of sergeant, though at one point he was given the responsibility of interrogating enemy prisoners because of his knowledge of German. Salinger also witnessed some of the heaviest combat of the war, and was, as Hamilton reports, profoundly affected by it, being at one time hospitalized for combat-related stress.

Salinger also continued to write, pounding out his stories on a portable typewriter he carried with him in his jeep around the European battle theaters. Back home many of these were being published in the commercially successful magazines for which he had trained himself to write. Among these were Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan.

His story "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," which he had sold in 1941, was finally published in the New Yorker in December 1946, beginning his long association with this important magazine. Although he has not chosen to reprint this story, parts of it were later rewritten for a chapter in The Catcher in the Rye. Another story, "I'm Crazy," which had appeared the previous December in Collier's, also dealt with Holden Caulfield and later found its way into the novel. It was at this time that Salinger began his career as a writer of serious fiction.

Between 1946 and 1951 he published seven stories in the New Yorker. His reception by the editors of this magazine during these years made him one of their top contributors. Among the stories Salinger published during the late 1940s was an account of a somewhat peculiar character who suddenly, violently, and almost inexplicably commits suicide. This story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," was the first featuring the mysterious, brooding, and tragic Seymour Glass, a character who haunts so much of Salinger's later work. Salinger eventually published several stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.

Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. The Catcher in the Rye quickly became a favorite among young people because it so skillfully validates adolescent experience with its spirit of rebellion. However, despite its popular success, the critical response to the novel was slow in getting underway. It was not until after the publication of Nine Stories in 1953 that Salinger began to attract serious critical attention. In the same year, Salinger moved from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire, the small town where he lived until his death in 2010.

By the mid-1950s to the early 1960s a Salinger industry had developed, particularly among younger scholars, who as college instructors identified with their students' concerns, which Salinger expressed so well. Through the later 1950s his notoriety was further enhanced by the gradual unfolding of the Glass saga in the pages of the New Yorker. Despite Salinger's departure from more conventional modes of narrative, the Glass stories generated considerable interest during this period.

The Glass saga consists of six short stories that have been published as "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (in Nine Stories), Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction, and "Hapworth 16, 1924". Other Glass stories dealing with more peripheral members of the family were apparently also published in Nine Stories, but they contribute little to the development of the central plot and were probably written at a time before Salinger had fully conceived the possibilities for the series.

Salinger led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980.

Achievements

• Salinger never won a literary award. This, however, is not a reflection on who he was as a writer. Salinger wrote a wealth of short stories, published a classic novel, and published several short story anthologies. His novel 'The Catcher in the Rye' has sold more than 65 million copies since its release. It is considered by 'Time' magazine, 'Modern Library' publishing house, and the 'BBC', as one of the best English novels published in the 20th century.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Catcher in the Rye

    (The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient...)

    1951
  • Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour

    (These two novellas, set seventeen years apart, are both c...)

    1963
  • Three Early Stories

    (Three Early Stories (Illustrated) is the first legitimate...)

    2014
  • Nine Stories 1953
  • Franny and Zooey 1961
  • For Esme-With Love and Squalor, and Other Stories 1950

Religion

Much has been written about Salinger's interests in Zen Buddhism and other Eastern religious philosophies that emphasize the abandonment of material values and the dissolution of the personal ego as a requisite for the enlightenment of the soul. Nonetheless, it is a well-known fact that since the late 1940s he has been an adherent of these ideas and a serious student of the East. His interest in these concepts has obviously crept into his fiction-particularly the later Glass stories narrated by Buddy Glass, which frequently discuss Zen practices

Views

The stories that Salinger wrote during the later 1940s and early 1950s illuminate not only the author's development as an artist, but also the development of American literature in what critics have come to call the Post-Modernist period - from 1950 on.

Writers during this period were responding to what they perceived as the threatening implications of the post-war world, in which whole populations had recently been exterminated and in which there existed the possibility of imminent nuclear destruction. It is little wonder that the art of this period should reflect a growing sense of despair, paranoia, and irrational violence. With writers such as Salinger, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, all of whom have emerged in the period since mid-century, there has been just such a shift in perception.

While it is hasty to suggest that Salinger was writing stories completely hopeless in their outlook, most of those he wrote during his most intensely creative period and collected in Nine Stories demonstrate the seemingly insoluble dilemma people face in coming to terms with the hell that has been either self-created in their own minds, or imposed upon them by the hostile conditions of contemporary life. In many of these stories, frequent victims of the sinister nature of the modern world are children groping with the mysterious problems of the adult world. Such is the case in the stories "Teddy," "Down at the Dinghy," and "The Laughing Man."

Other stories, however, focus upon the problems of adults, portraying them as hapless figures unable to deal with the complex emotional entanglements of their lives-Seymour Glass for example-or as active exploiters of other people. In the story "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," for instance, a man tries to comfort a late night caller who suspects his absent wife of infidelity. As the man calmly and rationally explains away the caller's fears, he is all the while lying in bed next to his friend's wife. Such lapses in personal morality are also a common feature of Salinger's work, making this story typical of what French calls "the pit of the modern urban hell," and one of the writer's most "bitter, cynical stories." In such a world, Seymour's final gesture seems almost to be a sensible solution to the vulgarity and phoniness of modern life. Although Salinger's world appears to be completely divided between the exploiters and their victims, a closer understanding of the author's work reveals that he offers responses other than suicide to cruelty, betrayal and hostility-responses that involve spiritual approaches to life.

One could say that Salinger's fiction involves the traditional quest motif with characters searching for wisdom or enlightenment (as are Seymour and Buddy Glass) or even more mundane things such as simple decency and a place to belong (as is Holden Caulfield). Another object of quest in Salinger's fiction, and perhaps the most profound, is what Dan Wakefield describes in an article in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait as the search for love. Wakefield argues that the search for unadulterated emotional contact is central to Salinger's work, which, he concludes, can be seen as "the history of human trouble and the poetry of love."

The power of unqualified love as a restorative agent against the evils of life is perhaps best illustrated in another of the stories appearing in Nine Stories, but originally published in the New Yorker in 1950. This story, "For Esme-With Love and Squalor," is one of Salinger's most expertly crafted and is perhaps, as Gwynn and Blotner suggest, his finest piece of short fiction. In the story a young English girl redeems an American soldier suffering from combat fatigue. The story is told by an unnamed narrator, a striving writer, who recalls his meeting with the thirteen-year-old Esme and her younger brother in a Devon tearoom one rainy afternoon just before D Day. Struck by her innocent beauty, precocity, and native charm, he promises to write a story for her about "squalor." Almost a year later while the soldier is recovering from a nervous reaction to combat, and still surrounded by the lingering hellish images of the just-ended war, he receives a battered package from Esme in which he finds enclosed with a letter the gift of her dead father's watch. In the letter she reminds him of his promise to write a story for her about "squalor," wishes him well, and remarks that she hopes he comes through the war with all of his "faculties intact." Reading her letter and contemplating its unselfish expression of affection, the narrator finds himself able to sleep (a restorative agent in Salinger's fiction). His recovery allows him to write this story and fulfill his promise six years later, which he does after receiving an invitation to Esme's wedding.

This gesture of Esme's-what Ihab Hassan, in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, calls "The Rare Quixotic Gesture"-represents Salinger's most eloquent answer to the dilemma of modern life. It also lies close to the center, as Hassan notes, of The Catcher in the Rye. While Holden Caulfield is decidedly a rebel against his society, his rebellion is one that strangely, does not attempt to overturn the established values system; rather, what Holden insists upon is that those values be restored from the perversion they have suffered under the world of "phonies."

In fact, one of Salinger's more subtle devices is to undercut his main character by placing him in situations wherein his own phoniness is exposed, and yet making his character all the more engaging through what readers quickly perceive as his sensitivity and native intelligence. Throughout the story Holden adopts many roles to deceive other people - the parent of an acquaintance, a pair of nuns, and a prostitute. His motivation, however, is not to exploit others, but rather a ploy to establish some contact with other people - regardless of how inappropriate that contact may be. In this respect, much of Holden's sympathetic appeal lies in his loneliness and difficulty in trying to sort out the confusing impulses of the adult world.

Quotations: "The world is full of actors pretending to be human"

"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. "

"The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. "

"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. "

"Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do. "

Personality

Jerome David Salinger is remembered as one of the most peculiar, reclusive writers of the twentieth century. Like Holden, the main character of the Catcher in the Rye, Salinger silently contemplated society, yet was repulsed by its intense hatred and hypocrisy. He was labeled as "curious and compassionate," he loved children as much as Holden admires his sister Phoebe. Salinger’s withdrawal from the media for 45 years has cemented his mystique.

Quotes from others about the person

• James Bryan: "The richness of spirit in this novel, especially of the vision, the compassion, and the humor of the narrator reveal a psyche far healthier than that of the boy who endured the events of the narrative. Through the telling of his story, Holden has given shape to, and thus achieved control of, his troubled past."
  
  Harold Brodkey: "His is the most influential body of work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway."

Interests

• homeopathy, microbiotics, acupuncture

• Writers

  Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge

Connections

Salinger was dating playwright Eugene O'Neill's daughter, Oona, in 1941. However, she soon ended their affair by marrying the legendary Charlie Chaplin.

After the war, Salinger, who stayed on in Europe as a civilian working for the army, married a French national. Very little is known about this union, except that the woman's first name was Sylvia and that she had some sort of professional credentials, possibly as a psychologist or osteopathic physician. The marriage ended in divorce soon after the couple's entrance into the United States in 1946.

In 1955 Salinger married British-born Claire Douglas, whom he met while she was a student at Radcliffe, and by whom he had two children - Margaret, and Matthew. That marriage also ended in divorce in 1967.

In 1972, the famous writer began an affair with a student of 'Yale University', Joyce Maynard, who was thirty-five years younger. The relationship lasted only a few months and was kept under the covers, but this affair was publicized by Maynard later, in her book titled, 'At Home in the World'.

He was dating actress Elaine Joyce before he got married in 1988 to a nurse named Colleen O'Neill, who was forty years younger than the writer.

Father:

Sol Salinger

Mother:

Miriam Salinger

Spouse:

Colleen O'Neill

child:

Matt Salinger

Matthew Robert "Matt" Salinger (born February 13, 1960) is an American actor and producer, known for his appearances in the films Revenge of the Nerds and Captain America.

child:

Margaret Salinger

sibling:

Doris Salinger

(1912–2001)

ex-spouse:

Claire Douglas

ex-spouse:

Sylvia Welter

Partner:

Joyce Maynard

Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American novelist and journalist.

Friend:

William Maxwell

William Keepers Maxwell Jr. (August 16, 1908 – July 31, 2000) was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975.

Friend:

Lillian Ross

Lillian Ross (June 8, 1918 – September 20, 2017) was an American journalist and author, who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, beginning in 1945.

References

• Salinger Salinger is a monumental book about the cost of war and the cost of art.
  2013
• The Afterlife of J.D. Salinger: A Beautiful Message from Beyond In this book, channeler Joanne Helfrich tunes into the thoughts and feelings of American author J.D. Salinger—from his afterlife perspective.
  2016
• J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High The life and work of the famous recluse 'in forensic detail'.
  2010
• J.D. Salinger This superb title, which includes a biographical timeline, and an interview with the author, is a must-read for literature fans.
  2005