About J.D. Salinger:
Jerome David Salinger is best known for his 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. He was born January 1, 1919, in New York City to a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent. Raised in Manhattan, he attended both public and private schools and participated in fencing and drama during his school years. He also wrote for the school newspaper at McBurney School.
He entered college and considered studying special education, but dropped out. His father, a merchandiser of Kosher cheese, encouraged him to learn the meat-importing business. That led him to work in Vienna. He left Austria just a month before it was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.
Upon his return to the United States, Salinger took some more college courses, dated a woman who later married Charlie Chaplain, and briefly worked as an activity director on a cruise ship. He began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. After a number of rejections, the magazine accepted December of 1941, accepted “Slight Rebellion off Madison.” However, the attack on Pearl Harbor delayed the actual publication of that piece until 1946.
During World War II, Salinger was drafted into the Army and served in a number of campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge. While in Europe, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, and the two began to correspond.
Salinger spent much of his latter years as a recluse and worked diligently to avoid public attention. He died of natural causes in 1910, at the age of 91.
The Catcher in the Rye was met with both popularity and condemnation. The book had been reprinted eight times within two months of its release and spent 30 weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list. But, it was banned in many countries and some U.S. schools due to language and vulgar content. It was at one time the “most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools” (after Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men). The book still sells today, and has achieved a worldwide sales total of over 65 million copies.
How did J.D. Salinger get the idea for The Catcher in the Rye?
The book’s themes of teenage angst and alienation are somewhat autobiographical, and Salinger closely identified with his protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Many of the events of Salinger’s youth are included in the events of the book.
Salinger used some revolutionary techniques in writing The Catcher in the Rye to display his gift of writing dialogue, which, according to some critics, distinguishes his work from others.
Excerpt from The Catcher in the Rye:
Where I want to start telling is the day I left Pencey Prep. Pency Prep is this school that’s in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. You probably heard about it. You’ve probably seen the ads, anyway. They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse’s picture, it always says: “Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.” Strictly for the birds. They don’t do any more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.
Well-known quote by J.D. Salinger:
“You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.”