Salinger just died



NEW YORK — J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose "The Catcher in the Rye" shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's longtime literary representative, Harold Ober Agency. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight – and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing – more than 60 million copies worldwide – and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher" presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator.

"`Catcher in the Rye' made a very powerful and surprising impression on me," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who read the book, as so many did, when he was in middle school. "Part of it was the fact that our seventh grade teacher was actually letting us read such a book. But mostly it was because `Catcher' had such a recognizable authenticity in the voice that even in 1977 or so, when I read it, felt surprising and rare in literature."

The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book holds many answers."

I just now read about this.

RIP Mr Salinger

RIP. Salinger Mr. Salinger


Tammy

It was a good book. He lived a long life, may he rest in peace.

John Updike and now Salinger. Have a paperback of the book, brilliant writer.

Such a great literary loss.


RIP JD



I checked his book out of my high school library, then moved before I could ck it back in.


That was over 20 yrs ago.


And I still have it.

I read it as a young teen and as I recall I remember asking myself "WTF is he talking about?"
Read "Siddhartha" around the same time and have kept a copy ever since.
IDK.

But God Bless him anyway.

•"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

•"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

•"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
- J.D. Salinger

•"How do you know what you are going to do until you do it? The answer is, you don't."
- J.D. Salinger

•"I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."
- J.D. Salinger

•"I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot."
- J.D. Salinger

•"It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."
- J.D. Salinger

•"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
- J.D. Salinger
R.I.P.

Wow! Heavy blow. "Catcher In The Rye" has been a life-long fave of mine for awhile as well as "Franny And Zooey" and his short story "A Perfect Day For Bannanafish". He'll be greatly missed!

I'm still reeling from this news. JD was a personal hero of mine....

RIP