User blog:American Eagle/Monticello Blog: J.D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger died January 27th, at the age of 91. The American author was best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. This is a tribute to the man.


 * Mr. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" caused a sensation when it was published. With its very first sentence, the book, which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. "Nine Stories," published in 1953, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone. -- The New York Times


 * It remains to be seen whether death will now publish Mr. Salinger — whether there is an archive of his later life’s work waiting to be revealed. There was a purity in Mr. Salinger’s separation from the world, whatever its motives, whatever his character. His half-century of solitude and silence was a creative act in itself, requiring extraordinary force of will.
 * This is the core truth that readers — and writers, too — often struggle with. Beneath the riches of the creative life, and hidden well away from the claims we place upon the writers we care for, there is still the one life, the ordinary life, to be lived. Mr. Salinger chose to live his in a way that only he and his immediate family could observe. It is as telling a silence as the blank spaces between his sentences. -- The New York Times


 * Take the austere little paperbacks down from the shelf and you can hold the collected works of J.D. Salinger — one novel, three volumes of stories — in the palm of one hand. Like some of his favorite writers — like Sappho, whom we know only from ancient fragments, or the Japanese poets who crafted 17-syllable haikus — Salinger was an author whose large reputation pivots on very little. The first of his published stories that he thought were good enough to preserve between covers appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. Sixteen years later he placed one last story there and drew down the shades. -- TIME


 * What were your favorite books in high school? If one of your answers was The Catcher in the Rye, chances are you were a misfit, at least in spirit, for some of your life. -- Manifesto Joe


 * After receiving critical acclaim for his short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which was published in The New Yorker in 1948, J. D. Salinger shot to worldwide fame with his novel The Catcher in the Rye, which appeared in 1951. With its disenchanted adolescent anti-hero, perpetually at war with adulthood, especially as embodied in his own parents, it seemed to encapsulate the mood of an entire generation. Perhaps more remarkably it simultaneously exercised a considerable effect on that generation’s behaviour. -- The Times