29- ] American Literature - J. D . Salinger

29- ] American Literature

J.D.Salinger

Writer Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, in New York, New York. Salinger was the youngest of two children born to Sol Salinger, the son of a rabbi who ran a thriving cheese and ham import business, and Miriam, Sol's Scottish-born wife. At a time when mixed marriages of this sort were looked at with disdain from all corners of society, Miriam's non-Jewish background was so well hidden that it was only after his bar mitzvah at the age of 14 that Salinger learned of his mother's roots.

Despite his apparent intellect, Salinger—or Sonny as he was known as child—wasn't much of a student. After flunking out of the McBurney School near his home in New York's Upper West Side, he was shipped off by his parents to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

Jerome David Salinger, usually shortened to J. D. Salinger, is one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century. J.D. Salinger was a literary giant despite his slim body of work and reclusive lifestyle. His landmark novel, The Catcher in the Rye, set a new course for literature in post-WWII America and vaulted Salinger to the heights of literary fame. Despite his slim body of work and reclusive lifestyle, Salinger was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. His short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, inspired the early careers of writers such as Phillip Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. In 1953, Salinger moved from New York City and led a secluded life, only publishing one new story before his death.

Aspiring Writer

After graduating from Valley Forge, Salinger returned to his hometown for one year to attend New York University before heading off to Europe, flush with some cash and encouragement from his father to learn another language and learn more about the import business. But Salinger, who spent the bulk of his five months overseas in Vienna, paid closer attention to language than business.

Upon returning home, he made another attempt at college, this time at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, before coming back to New York and taking night classes at Columbia University. There, Salinger met Professor Whit Burnett, who would change his life.

Burnett wasn't just a good teacher, he was also the editor of Story magazine, an influential publication that showcased short stories. Burnett, sensing Salinger's talent as a writer, pushed him to create more often and soon Salinger's work was appearing not just in Story, but in other big-name publications such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

'The Catcher In the Rye'

When Salinger returned to New York in 1946, he quickly set about resuming his life as a writer and soon found his work published in his favorite magazine, The New Yorker. He also continued to push on with the work on his novel. Finally, in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was published.

The book earned its share of positive reviews, but some critics weren't so kind. A few saw the main character of Caulfield and his quest for something pure in an otherwise "phony" world as promoting immoral views. But over time the American reading public ate the book up and The Catcher in the Rye became an integral part of the academic literature curriculum. To date, the book has sold more than 65 million copies.

Along the way, Caulfield has become as entrenched in the American psyche as much as any fictional character. Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon was found with a copy of the book at the time of his arrest and later explained that reason for the shooting could be found in the book's pages.

Not surprisingly, Catcher vaulted Salinger to a level of unrivaled literary fame. For the young writer, who had fiercely boasted in college about his talents, the success he had seemingly craved early in life became something he ran away from once it came.

Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent, relates in authentic teenage idiom his flight from the “phony” adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his final collapse on a psychiatrist’s couch. The humour and colourful language of The Catcher in the Rye place it in the tradition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger’s child characters, views his life with an added dimension of precocious self-consciousness. Nine Stories (1953), a selection of Salinger’s short stories, added to his reputation. Several of his published pieces feature the siblings of the fictional Glass family, beginning with Seymour’s appearance in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” In works such as Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), the introspective Glass children, influenced by their eldest brother and his death, navigate questions about spirituality and enlightenment.

Reclusive Lifestyle

In 1953, two years after the publication of Catcher, Salinger pulled up stakes in New York City and retreated to a secluded, 90-acre place in Cornish, New Hampshire. There, Salinger did his best to cut-off contact with the public and significantly slowed his literary output.

Two collections of his work, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters—all of which had appeared previously in The New Yorker—were published in book form in the early 1960s. In the June 19, 1965, edition of The New Yorker nearly the entire issue was dedicated to a new short story, the 25,000-word "Hapworth 16, 1924." To the dismay of many anxious readers, "Hapworth" was the last Salinger piece ever to be published while he was still alive.

Personal Life, Death and Legacy

Despite Salinger's best efforts, not all of his life remained private. In 1966, Claire Douglas sued for divorce, reporting that if the relationship continued it "would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason."

Six years later, Salinger found himself in another relationship, this time with a college freshman named Joyce Maynard, whose story, "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" had appeared in The New York Times Magazine and caught the interest of the older writer.

The two lived together in Cornish for 10 months before Salinger kicked her out. In 1998, Maynard wrote about her time with Salinger in a salacious memoir that painted a controlling and obsessive portrait of her former lover. A year later, Maynard auctioned off a series of letters Salinger had written her while they were still together. The letters fetched $156,500. The buyer, a computer programmer, later returned them to Salinger as a gift.

In 2000, Salinger's daughter Margaret wrote an equally negative account of her father that like Maynard's earlier book was met with mixed reviews. For Salinger, other relationships followed his affair with Maynard. For some time he dated the actress Elaine Joyce. Later, he married a young nurse named Colleen O'Neill. The two were married up until his death on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish.

Despite the lack of published work over the last four decades of his life, Salinger continued to write. Those who knew him said he worked every day and speculation swirled about the amount of work that he may have finished. One estimate claims that there may be as many as 10 finished novels locked away in his house.

In 2013, new light was shed on Salinger's life and work. Shane Salerno and David Shields published a biography of the famed writer entitled Salinger. One of its revelations was that there were about five unpublished works by Salinger that are scheduled to be released over the next few years. Salerno also created a film documentary on Salinger, which debuted around the same time as his book with Shields.

Literary style and themes

In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote, "I almost always write about very young people", a statement that has been called his credo Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940), to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world." For this reason, Norman Mailer once remarked that Salinger was "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school." Salinger's language, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were published and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work.

Salinger identified closely with his characters, and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue.

Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large", the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults, and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.

Contemporary critics discuss a clear progression over the course of Salinger's published work, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews each of his three post-Catcher story collections received. Hamilton adheres to this view, arguing that while Salinger's early stories for the "slicks" boasted "tight, energetic" dialogue, they had also been formulaic and sentimental. It took the standards of The New Yorker editors, among them William Shawn, to refine his writing into the "spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld" qualities of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), The Catcher in the Rye, and his stories of the early 1950s. By the late 1950s, as Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and parenthetical remarks. Louis Menand agrees, writing in The New Yorker that Salinger "stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense ... He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control." In recent years, some critics have defended certain post-Nine Stories works by Salinger; in 2001, Janet Malcolm wrote in The New York Review of Books that "Zooey" "is arguably Salinger's masterpiece ... Rereading it and its companion piece 'Franny' is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby."

Influence

Salinger's writing has influenced several prominent writers, prompting Harold Brodkey (an O. Henry Award-winning author) to say in 1991, "His is the most influential body of work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway." Of the writers in Salinger's generation, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike, attested that "the short stories of J. D. Salinger really opened my eyes as to how you can weave fiction out of a set of events that seem almost unconnected, or very lightly connected ... [Reading Salinger] stick[s] in my mind as really having moved me a step up, as it were, toward knowing how to handle my own material." Menand has observed that the early stories of Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth were affected by "Salinger's voice and comic timing".

National Book Award finalist Richard Yates told The New York Times in 1977 that reading Salinger's stories for the first time was a landmark experience, and that "nothing quite like it has happened to me since".[154] Yates called Salinger "a man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled, and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word." Gordon Lish's O. Henry Award-winning short story "For Jeromé—With Love and Kisses" (1977, collected in What I Know So Far, 1984) is a play on Salinger's "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor".

In 2001, Menand wrote in The New Yorker that "Catcher in the Rye rewrites" among each new generation had become "a literary genre all its own". He classed among them Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984), and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Writer Aimee Bender was struggling with her first short stories when a friend gave her a copy of Nine Stories; inspired, she later described Salinger's effect on writers, explaining: "[I]t feels like Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a day, and that incredible feeling of ease inspires writing. Inspires the pursuit of voice. Not his voice. My voice. Your voice." Authors such as Stephen Chbosky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Carl Hiaasen, Susan Minot, Haruki Murakami, Gwendoline Riley, Tom Robbins, Louis Sachar, Joel Stein, Leonardo Padura, and John Green have cited Salinger as an influence. Musician Tomas Kalnoky of Streetlight Manifesto also cites Salinger as an influence, referencing him and Holden Caulfield in the song "Here's to Life". Biographer Paul Alexander called Salinger "the Greta Garbo of literature".

In the mid-1960s, Salinger was drawn to Sufi mysticism through the writer and thinker Idries Shah's seminal work The Sufis, as were others writers such as Doris Lessing and Geoffrey Grigson and the poets Robert Graves and Ted Hughes. As well as Shah, Salinger read the Taoist philosopher Lao Tse and the Hindu Swami Vivekananda who introduced the Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world.

List of works

Books

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) , Nine Stories (1953) , "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948) , "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948) , "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (1948) , "The Laughing Man" (1949) , "Down at the Dinghy" (1949) , "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" (1950) , "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" (1951) , "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" (1952) "Teddy" (1953) , Franny and Zooey (1961), reworked from "Ivanoff, the Terrible" (1956) , "Franny" (1955) , "Zooey" (1957) , Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) , "Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters" (1955) , "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959) , Three Early Stories (2014)

"The Young Folks" (1940) , "Go See Eddie" (1940) , "Once a Week Won't Kill You" (1944)

Published stories

"The Hang of It" (1941, republished in The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors and Marines, 1943) , "The Heart of a Broken Story" (1941) , "Personal Notes of an Infantryman" (1942) , "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" (1942, republished in Stories: The Fiction of the Forties, ed. Whit Burnett, 1949)

"The Varioni Brothers" (1943) , "Both Parties Concerned" (1944)

"Soft-Boiled Sergeant" (1944) , "Last Day of the Last Furlough" (1944) , "Elaine" (1945) , "The Stranger" (1945) , "I'm Crazy" (1945) , "A Boy in France" (1945, republished in Post Stories 1942–45, ed. Ben Hibbs, 1946 and July/August 2010 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine), reworked from "What Babe Saw, or Ooh-La-La!" (1944)

"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (1945, republished in The Armchair Esquire, ed. L. Rust Hills, 1959) , "Slight Rebellion off Madison" (1946, republished in Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, ed. David Remnick, 2000) , "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All" (1947)

"The Inverted Forest" (1947) , "Blue Melody" (1948) , "A Girl I Knew" (1948, republished in Best American Short Stories 1949, ed. Martha Foley, 1949) , "Hapworth 16, 1924" (1965)

Unpublished stories

"The Survivors" (1939) , "The long hotel story" (1940) , "The Fishermen" (1941) , "Lunch for Three" (1941) , "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler" (1941) , "Monologue for a Watery Highball" (1941) , "The Lovely Dead Girl at Table Six" (1941) , "Mrs. Hincher" (1942), also known as "Paula" , "The Kissless Life of Reilly" (1942) , "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" (1942),

"Holden On the Bus" (1942) , "Men Without Hemingway" (1942)

"Over the Sea Let’s Go, Twentieth Century Fox" (1942) , "The Broken Children" (1943) , "Paris" (1943) , "Rex Passard on the Planet Mars" (1943) ,

"Bitsey" (1943) , "What Got Into Curtis in the Woodshed" (1944) , "The Children's Echelon" (1944), also known as "Total War Diary" , "Boy Standing in Tennessee" (1944) , "The Magic Foxhole" (1944) , "Two Lonely Men" (1944) , "A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt" (1944) , "The Daughter of the Late, Great Man" (1945) , "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" (1947) , "Birthday Boy" (1946), also known as "The Male Goodbye" , "The Boy in the People Shooting Hat" (1948) , "A Summer Accident" (1949) , "Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera" (1950)