J. D. Salinger (1919-2010). Biography and Creativity

A mong the most famous literary figures of the 20 th century, J(erome) D(avid) Salinger is known both for his writing, especially his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and for his refusal to become a celebrity figure. The biographer Ian Hamilton described Salinger as a man “famous for not wanting to be famous”. Until his death in 2010, Salinger’s reclusive lifestyle, unmatched in tenacity by any author in living memory—with the exception of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, who is said to have “out-Salingered Salinger”— engendered a cultlike mystique. His fan base is uncommonly loyal and ardent.

Although Salinger published no new fiction after 1965, his collected works continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Yet, in spite of his popularity, Salinger’s personal history remains a collage of sketchy details and uncorroborated anecdotes. Salinger’s withdrawal from the public domain creates a paradox for curious admirers and serious biographers alike. On the one hand, the author always refused to explain his motives or give a first-person account of his life. On the other hand, Salinger’s stories, particularly those published in the 1940s and early 1950s, invite readers into his private sphere, for they are heavily indebted to the author’s personal experiences. Unlike Holden Caulfield’s dream author, Salinger often seemed contemptuous of his readership, a fact that begs the question, How can we really know J. D. Salinger?

The second child and only son of Sol and Miriam Jillich, Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day 1919. Known by his family as “Sonny,” Salinger was raised in a Jewish household, one that moved frequently during the boy’s early years. In 1932, the same year Sonny celebrated his bar mitzvah, the Salingers settled into an apartment on Park Avenue. Located in one of New York City’s most exclusive neighborhoods, the new home verified Sol’s success in the competitive import-export business and became an outward sign that the family had “made it” in upper-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture.

Around the same time, Salinger and his older sister, Doris, discovered that Miriam was born a Christian into a Scotch-Irish home and had, around the time she converted to Judaism, changed her name from Marie to appease Sol’s family. The revelation coincided with Salinger’s first enrollment in a private Christian academy, the McBurney School, where Sol received special dispensation for his son to attend. Never more than a mediocre student, Salinger received poor grades and, after two years, was asked not to return. Thinking his son needed discipline, Sol sent Salinger to Valley Forge Military Academy, a boarding school in nearby Pennsylvania, where, despite another mediocre academic resume, he graduated in 1936.

Salinger followed high school with a half-hearted attempt at college, attending New York University for two semesters before dropping out. By this time Salinger had been composing stories in his spare time for a few years and had even begun to dream of a career as a writer. His father had other plans. In 1937, growing impatient with his son’s lack of interest in academia and the family business, Sol sent Salinger to Europe to learn the meat and cheese importing trade. Salinger spent most of his time in Vienna and Bydgoszcz, a small city in northern Poland.

The trip had the opposite effect Sol intended: While shadowing a family friend who bought and sold pigs for the ham industry, Salinger was so disgusted he vowed never to follow in his father’s footsteps. He sojourned in Austria and Poland at a critical time in European history. Adolf Hitler had been German chancellor for nearly five years when Salinger arrived. Just months after Salinger returned home, Austria ceded political autonomy to the Nazis. A year later, Germany invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. During Salinger’s stay in both countries, anti-Semitism had reached a fevered pitch, and although Salinger has never publicly commented on his European stay, the agitation and terror consuming the Continent during the late 1930s made a lasting impression. Four years later, when the United States declared war on Germany and Japan, Salinger volunteered for military duty.

In the years between touring Europe and joining the army, Salinger developed his craft. He made a second run at postsecondary education in 1938, attending Ursinas College in Collegetown, Pennsylvania. In the nine weeks he studied there, he wrote a weekly humor column for the school newspaper, earning a reputation as a witty essayist and storyteller. The following semester, once again living with his parents, Salinger audited a short-story writing course at Columbia University. The class instructor, Whit Burnett, quickly recognized Salinger’s potential. Burnett had a keen eye for gifted young writers; his literary journal, Story, published early works by several now-famous authors, including Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, and Richard Wright.

In 1940, when “The Young Folks” appeared in the March-April issue of Story, Salinger joined the list of writers Burnett had “discovered.” Primarily because of Burnett’s reputation, several editors of popular magazines took notice. From 1940 until he stopped publishing in the mid-1960s, Salinger experienced little difficulty finding a public venue for his work. Over the next two years, Salinger published three more stories: “Go See Eddie” (1940) in University of Kansas City Review, “The Hang of It” (1941) in Collier’s, and “The Heart of a Broken Story” (1941) in Esquire. Joining the military did not slow Salinger’s momentum. Between 1942 and 1945 he produced 12 stories, three of which appeared in Burnett’s journal.

The other nine were published in so-called slicks, popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Esquire, which enjoyed wide readerships despite lackluster literary reputations. Read in chronological order, these stories chart Salinger’s developing style, including his ear for local speech patterns and his preference for dialogue. They also map a growing disillusionment with social constructs, which, in his later works, cripple the individual autonomy of his characters, making it nearly impossible for them to form an authentic sense of self. By 1945 Salinger’s sentimental tone had given way to pessimism.

The attitude shift makes sense in light of the author’s experiences. On June 6, 1944, after spending more than two years training for military action, Salinger landed on Utah Beach with the army’s Fourth Infantry Division, part of the Allies’ D-day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. In the ensuing 11 months, Salinger fought in several of the war’s deadliest campaigns, including the Battle of Hurt- gen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Between D-day and the end of the war in Europe (May 8, 1945), the Fourth Division incurred an average of 2,000 casualties per month. The carnage took its toll on Salinger’s psyche.

Two months after the end of combat operations, probably suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, Salinger checked into a military hospital in Nuremburg, where he recuperated for several weeks. Once released, he remained in Europe as a private contractor for the Department of Defense; during that time he met and married a young woman named Sylvia, about whom little is known. Although she relocated to the United States with Salinger in May 1946, Sylvia returned almost immediately to Europe, where she filed for divorce.

Later that year Salinger endured another blow. For some time Burnett had wanted to collect Salinger’s best work under the working title The Young Folks. After Burnett and Salinger ironed out the details, Lippincott declined to publish the book. When the deal fell through, Salinger blamed Burnett. In the blink of an eye the trust Burnett had earned as Salinger’s mentor and first publisher evaporated, and until Burnett’s 1973 death, Salinger refused to work with him. The setbacks notwithstanding, 1946 was a milestone year for Salinger. On December 21, the New Yorker published “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” kicking off a long relationship between the magazine and one of its most famous contributors.

Among American weeklies, the New Yorker was unique; at that time it was the only widely read and well-respected literary venue. It could afford to pay contributors well without sacrificing its esteem among scholars and critics. An early version of Catcher in the Rye, “Slight Rebellion” had been gathering dust at the New Yorker’s headquarters for five years. Approved for publication in late 1941, the story was shelved after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that made the tale of a self-absorbed adolescent seem trite. When the war ended, American life began returning to normal, and the New Yorker finally printed “Slight Rebellion.” Salinger’s popularity with both critics and general audiences skyrocketed.

In early 1948, after placing stories in Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan, Salinger published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in the New Yorker. The story of a young war veteran’s suicide, “Banan- afish” marked the beginning of Salinger’s most critically acclaimed period. During that time he published all of his Nine Stories as well as his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. First conceived as a novella, Catcher grew to novel length over the course of a decade. Upon its 1951 publication the book expanded Salinger’s audience beyond magazine readers; within a few years of its release it had become standard reading for members of early 1950s counterculture. Catcher’s popularity thrust Salinger into the limelight. Uncomfortable with fame, he quickly grew impatient with the public. In 1953 he moved from the New York area to Cornish, New Hampshire, a remote rural community where he could escape interview-seeking journalists and autograph-hunting admirers.

Also in 1953 Salinger published his second book, Nine Stories. A collection of his best short work, it cemented Salinger’s reputation with “serious” critics and academics. Unlike Catcher, which garnered mixed reviews, Nine Stories was met with near-universal acclaim. The Pulitzer Prizewinning author Eudora Welty heaped praise on the book in her New York Times review, declaring Salinger’s writing “original, first rate, serious, and beautiful.” Although Nine Stories consists entirely of previously released material, scholars have often treated it as a short story cycle, a collection binding individual narratives into a unified whole. In this case, each of the Nine Stories portrays a different way of confronting a hollow, materialistic world. From Seymour Glass’s suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to Teddy McArdle’s serene acceptance of death in “Teddy,” Salinger explores the clash between the individual’s search for spiritual meaning and the social mechanisms that stand in his or her way.

After Nine Stories, Salinger’s writing changed. He remained preoccupied with the individual’s struggle to cope in a “plastic,” materialist world, but his tone became didactic. From the early 1950s onward Salinger developed a religious perspective combining Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. At the same time, he adopted a vision of the artist popular among 19th-century romantics. According to this view, the artist is an exceedingly rare individual in touch with a divine imagination, which he transmits onto the page, canvas, or musical score. The central figure in Salinger’s later stories, Seymour Glass, is the paradigmatic example of what the author calls the “artist-seer,” a person through whom we glimpse the sublime.

Together, “Franny” (1955), “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), “Zooey” (1957), “Seymour: An Introduction” (1959), and “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965) proffer a vision in which art and spiritual transcendence coalesce, affording individuals their only escape from a “phony” world. These stories depart from Salinger’s earlier work in style as well as substance, often abandoning the narrative control and linguistic precision for which he was known.

The shift was gradual but unmistakable. Critics chided him for it. Although the reaction to “Carpenters” was generally positive, reviewers were largely unsympathetic to Salinger’s other post-1953 efforts. Nevertheless, his popularity with general audiences, especially the young, did not taper. In 1961, with Catcher's fame at an all-time high, Franny and Zooey topped the New York Times best-seller list for six months. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction was the third-best-selling book of 1963.

The same year the New Yorker printed “Franny” and “Carpenters,” Salinger married Claire Douglas. The couple had two children—Margaret in 1955, Mathew in 1960—but, after 12 rocky years, Claire filed for divorce. Since Salinger stopped publishing in 1965, a few incidents have drawn him to the public’s attention. In 1972, at the age of 53, he wooed an 18-year-old college freshman, Joyce Maynard, who dropped out of Yale and moved into Salinger’s home. The affair lasted nine months. For many, including the Salinger biographer Paul Alexander, the incident confirmed a long-held suspicion: Salinger harbored an unhealthy predilection for young girls. In 1974 Salinger sued a San Francisco bookseller for publishing a pirated edition of his uncollected works.

The suit was settled 12 years later in Salinger’s favor, the same year he filed a legal injunction to prevent Ian Hamilton from publishing an unauthorized biography that included the author’s private correspondence. The suit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with Salinger in 1987. After a decade outside the public eye, Joyce Maynard published At Home in the World, breaking a 26-year silence about her involvement with Salinger. In 2000 Margaret Salinger’s memoir, Dream Catcher, created another stir, largely because it revealed intimate, often disparaging details about her father. Although many Salinger fans accused Maynard and Margaret Salinger of exploiting the writer’s fame, their accounts reshaped Salinger’s image, painting a more nuanced, darker portrait of a man who continues to intrigue Americans. Salinger died in 2010 at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.