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"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours." -
J.D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, was born on January 1, 1919 in New York City to a Jewish
father and a half-Scottish, half-Irish mother. He graduated from Valley
Forge Military Academy in 1936 and then studied at New York University for a
year before dropping out to work as an entertainer on a cruise ship. The
following year he joined the meat-importation business where his father worked,
and was sent to Austria, which he left just one month before Hitler invaded in
March 1938. On his return, he attended Ursinus College for a very short time where
he was purportedly labeled "the worst English student in the history of the
College" by a professor. In 1939 he took an evening class in
writing at Columbia University; his teacher was Whit Burnett, editor of Story
Magazine who published Salinger's debut story in Story Magazine in 1940.
Salinger was drafted into the 4th Infantry Division in 1942 and served until 1946.
Fluent in French and German he saw action on Utah Beach on D-Day and at the
Battle of the Bulge before being assigned to Counter-Intelligence where he
interrogated prisoners of war. He was one of the first soldiers to enter a
liberated concentration camp and much later told his daughter that "You never
really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how
long you live." He stayed with the army in Germany for about six
months after the war, and met and married a German woman who he met while
interrogating her. She returned with him to the USA but the marriage broke
up shortly afterwards.
During and after the war he published stories, some of which drew on his wartime
experiences. The first collection of these, For Esme - With Love and
Squalor, was published in 1953. All the stories in the collection had formerly appeared in the New
Yorker which was where the majority of his stories after 1948 were first
published following the success of "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" published in
the New Yorker in 1948. Further collections followed in 1961 and
1963.
He is best known for his first and only published novel, The Catcher in the
Rye, which was published in 1951 and remains extraordinarily popular even
today (about 250,000 copies were sold in 2000). Catcher in the Rye was not the
first time Salinger had written about Holden Caulfield, who had first appeared in a
semi-autobiographical story titled "Slight Rebellion Off Madision" which the New
Yorker accepted in 1942 but did not publish until 1946.
Following the publication of Catcher In The Rye, Salinger gradually withdrew
from public life, moving from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire and keeping to
himself. In 1955 he married a Radcliffe student, Claire Douglas, who dropped out
of school four months before graduation at his request. They had two children,
Margaret and Matthew, but due to Salinger's desire for isolation they rarely saw
people. Margaret was sick much of the time but Salinger, a Christian Scientist at the time, refused to take her to a doctor. The marriage ended in divorce
in 1965.
His last published story was "Hapworth 16, 1924" in The New Yorker in 1965.
During the 1970s there were reports that he was due to publish another novel and
in Salinger is said to have told a friend that he had recently finished "a long,
romantic book set in World War II."
Salinger is currently married to his third wife, Colleen O'Neill, 40 years his
junior. In 2000, his daughter, Margaret Salinger published Dream
Catcher: A Memoir, in which she described her father as keeping her mother a "virtual prisoner", but also describes him as far from reclusive, traveling often and having friends all over the world - in short, a bon vivant in every sense except when it comes to his family and matters of publicity.
Did you know?
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