Obituaries--J.D. Salinger

Author and noted recluse J.D. Salinger has died. He wrote many short stories, but just one novel, his most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye, a staple of many high school literature classes and censorship lists. The central character, prep school student and head case Holden Caulfield, was a forerunner of the what would later be called the "youth culture."

When I was young, it was my favorite novel. I haven't read it in many, many years, so I don't know how it would affect me now.

He also had an infamous affair with writer Joyce Maynard, when she was still in her teens and he was in his fifties. It ended badly, and years later she sold her letters from him.

Salinger was 91 years old:

Salinger drew from Sherwood Anderson, Isak Dinesen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and especially Ring Lardner, whose wise-guy voice you hear chiming in the snappy banalities and sometimes desperate patter spoken by Salinger's characters, a tone that found its way years later into the neurotic chatter of Woody Allen's New Yorkers. But Salinger bent it all into something new, a tone that drew from the secular and the religious, the worldly and the otherworldly, the ecstatic and the unconsolable. It's customary to assume that the seven Glass children — the Glass family, an intricate hybrid of showbiz and spirituality, was his other enduring creation — make up a kind of group portrait of Salinger, each of them a reflection of his different dimensions: the writer and the actor, the searcher and the researcher, the spiritual adept and the pratfalling schmuck. That may very well be true. He made sure we could never be sure. Holden Caulfield says, "Don't ever tell anybody anything." That's one time you know it's Salinger talking.

He poured his resentment into a tirade against Hollywood that Holden Caulfield delivers in Catcher, which was published in July 1951. A few critics objected to Caulfield's free use of fairly innocuous curse words, but most of the reviews were exultant. Catcher stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, then developed its enduring afterlife. But Salinger had long since moved on from concerns with adolescent dissatisfaction to an interest in Eastern religion, especially the Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th-century Hindu mystic. His beliefs started to find their way into his fiction. In his haunting story "Teddy," a college instructor on a transatlantic cruise ship makes the acquaintance of an otherworldly little boy who calmly believes himself to be a reincarnated soul and meets a fate he predicts for himself.

He was married three times, had two children, and three grandsons. About the affair with Maynard:

Twenty-five years later she wrote about their relationship in a memoir, "At Home in the World," the only detailed picture we have of Salinger in later life. She was prompted to go public, she said, by the discovery that he had carried on the same kind of intimate correspondences with other young women, whom he then dropped just as he did her. One year after her book was published Maynard also put 15 of his letters to her up for auction. They were bought for $156,500 by the software entrepreneur Peter Norton, who returned them to Salinger.

NYT obituary