J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger ( SAL-in-jər; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.

The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success; Salinger's depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel was widely read and controversial, and its success led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); Franny and Zooey (1961), a volume containing a novella and a short story; and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Salinger's last published work, the novella Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: his former lover Joyce Maynard and his daughter Margaret Salinger. Salinger died of natural causes in 2010.

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York City, on January 1, 1919. His father, Sol Salinger, traded in kosher cheese, and was from a family of Lithuanian-Jewish descent from the Russian Empire. Sol's father was the rabbi for Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Louisville, Kentucky.

Salinger's mother, Marie (née Jillich), was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scottish descent, "but changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws" and considered herself Jewish after marrying Salinger's father. Salinger did not learn that his mother was not of Jewish ancestry until just after he celebrated his bar mitzvah. He had one sibling, an older sister, Doris (1912–2001).

In his youth, Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan. In 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue, and Salinger enrolled at the McBurney School, a nearby private school. Salinger had trouble fitting in and took measures to conform, such as calling himself Jerry. His family called him Sonny. At McBurney, he managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper and appeared in plays. He "showed an innate talent for drama," though his father opposed the idea of his becoming an actor. His parents then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Salinger began writing stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight". He was the literary editor of the class yearbook, Crossed Sabres, and participated in the glee club, aviation club, French club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.

Salinger's Valley Forge Military Personnel File says he was a "mediocre" student, and his recorded IQ between 111 and 115 was slightly above average. He graduated in 1936. Salinger started his freshman year at New York University in 1936. He considered studying special education but dropped out the following year. His father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business, and he went to work at a company in Vienna and Bydgoszcz, Poland. Salinger was disgusted by the slaughterhouses and decided to pursue a different career. This disgust and his rejection of his father likely influenced his vegetarianism as an adult.

In late 1938, Salinger attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and wrote a column called "skipped diploma", which included movie reviews. He dropped out after one semester. In 1939, Salinger attended the Columbia University School of General Studies in Manhattan, where he took a writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine. According to Burnett, Salinger did not distinguish himself until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point "he suddenly came to life" and completed three stories. Burnett told Salinger that his stories were skillful and accomplished, accepting "The Young Folks," a vignette about several aimless youths, for publication in Story. Salinger's debut short story was published in the magazine's March–April 1940 issue. Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded for several years.

In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding her self-absorbed (he confided to a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in love with little Oona"), he called her often and wrote her long letters. Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married. In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly a performer.

Between 1941 and 1943, Salinger sent nine letters and postcards to Marjorie Sheard, an aspiring Canadian writer, including one in which he mentions his first Holden Caulfield story. The Morgan Library & Museum acquired the letters in 2013 and displayed them in an exhibit, "'Lose not heart': J. D. Salinger's Letters to an Aspiring Writer".

The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. The magazine rejected seven of his stories that year, including "Lunch for Three," "Monologue for a Watery Highball," and "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler." But in December 1941, it accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters". When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered "unpublishable." Salinger was devastated. The story appeared in The New Yorker in 1946, after the war ended.

In early 1942, several months after the U.S. entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the army, where he saw combat as a counterintelligence agent with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.

During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was then working as a war correspondent in Paris. Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two began corresponding; Salinger wrote to Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war, and added that he was working on a play about Caulfield and hoped to play the part himself.

After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of denazification duty in Germany for the Counterintelligence Corps. He lived in Weißenburg and, soon after, married Sylvia Welter. He brought her to the United States in April 1946, but the marriage fell apart after eight months and Sylvia returned to Germany. In 1972, Salinger's daughter Margaret was with him when he received a letter from Sylvia. He looked at the envelope, and, without reading it, tore it apart. It was the first time he had heard from her since the breakup but, as Margaret put it, "when he was finished with a person, he was through with them."

In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint. The collection, The Young Folks, was to consist of 20 stories—ten, like the title story and "Slight Rebellion off Madison", already in print and ten previously unpublished. Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book. Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.

By the late 1940s, Salinger had become an avid follower of Zen Buddhism, to the point that he "gave reading lists on the subject to his dates".

In 1947, Salinger submitted a short story, "The Bananafish", to The New Yorker. William Maxwell, the magazine's fiction editor, was impressed enough with "the singular quality of the story" that the magazine asked Salinger to continue revising it. He spent a year reworking it with New Yorker editors and the magazine published it, now titled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", in the January 31, 1948, issue. The magazine thereon offered Salinger a "first-look" contract that allowed it right of first refusal on any future stories. The critical acclaim accorded "Bananafish" coupled with problems Salinger had with stories being altered by the "slicks" led him to publish almost exclusively in The New Yorker. "Bananafish" was also the first of Salinger's published stories to feature the Glasses, a fictional family consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. Salinger published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.

In the early 1940s, Salinger confided in a letter to Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories to achieve financial security. According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger was disappointed when "rumblings from Hollywood" over his 1943 short story "The Varioni Brothers" came to nothing. Therefore, he immediately agreed when, in mid-1948, independent film producer Samuel Goldwyn offered to buy the film rights to his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut." Though Salinger sold the story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it "would make a good movie", critics lambasted the film upon its release in 1949. Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the film departed to such an extent from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg called it a "bastardization."

In the 1940s, Salinger told several people that he was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of his short story "Slight Rebellion off Madison", and Little, Brown and Company published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951. Letters released in 2026 show that during production Salinger asked editor John Woodburn to remove references to his Jewish and Irish background from the dust jacket because he feared reviewers would overemphasize it. The novel's plot is straightforward, detailing 17-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City after his fourth expulsion and departure from an elite college preparatory school.

The book is more notable for the persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden. He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity. In a 1953 interview with a high school newspaper, Salinger admitted that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical, explaining, "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book, and it was a great relief telling people about it."

Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging from The New York Times hailing Catcher as "an unusually brilliant first novel" to denigrations of the book's monotonous language and Holden's "immorality and perversion" (he uses religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution). The novel was a popular success; within two months of its publication, it had been reprinted eight times. It spent 30 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late 1950s, according to Salinger's biographer Ian Hamilton, it had "become the book all brooding adolescents had to buy, the indispensable manual from which cool styles of disaffectation could be borrowed." It has been compared with Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Newspapers began publishing articles about the "Catcher Cult", and the novel was banned in several countries—as well as some U.S. schools—because of its subject matter and what Catholic World reviewer Riley Hughes called an "excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language". According to one angry parent's tabulation, 237 instances of "goddamn", 58 uses of "bastard", 31 "Chrissakes", and one incident of flatulence constituted what was wrong with Salinger's book.

In the 1970s, several U.S. high school teachers who assigned the book were fired or forced to resign. A 1979 study of censorship noted that The Catcher in the Rye "had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the nation and the second-most frequently taught novel in public high schools" (after John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men). The book remains widely read; as of 2004, it was selling about 250,000 copies per year, "with total worldwide sales over 10 million copies".

In the wake of its 1950s success, Salinger received (and rejected) numerous offers to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen, including one from Samuel Goldwyn. Since its publication, there has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg among those seeking to secure the rights. In the 1970s Salinger said, "Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden." Salinger repeatedly refused, and in 1999 his ex-lover Joyce Maynard concluded, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."

In a July 1951 profile in Book of the Month Club News, Salinger's friend and New Yorker editor William Maxwell asked Salinger about his literary influences. He replied, "A writer, when he's asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves. I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge. I won't name any living writers. I don't think it's right" (although O'Casey was in fact alive at the time). In letters from the 1940s, Salinger expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor". Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald's story "May Day".

Salinger wrote friends of a momentous change in his life in 1952, after several years of practicing Zen Buddhism, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna about Hindu religious teacher Sri Ramakrishna. He became an adherent of Ramakrishna's Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which advocated celibacy for those seeking enlightenment, and detachment from human responsibilities such as family. Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story "Teddy", published in 1953, features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights. He also studied the writings of Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda; in "Hapworth 16, 1924", Seymour Glass calls him "one of the most exciting, original and best-equipped giants of this century."

In 1953, Salinger published a collection of seven stories from The New Yorker (including "Bananafish"), as well as two the magazine had rejected. The collection was published as Nine Stories in the United States, and "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" in the UK, after one of Salinger's best-known stories. The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—"remarkably so for a volume of short stories," according to Hamilton. Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.

As The Catcher in the Rye's notability grew, Salinger gradually withdrew from public view. In 1953, he moved from an apartment at 300 East 57th Street, New York, to Cornish, New Hampshire. Early in his time at Cornish he was relatively sociable, particularly with students at Windsor High School. Salinger invited them to his house frequently to play records and talk about problems at school. One such student, Shirley Blaney, persuaded Salinger to be interviewed for the high school page of The Daily Eagle, the city paper. After the interview appeared prominently in the newspaper's editorial section, Salinger cut off all contact with the high schoolers without explanation. He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.

In February 1955, at age 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas (b. 1933), a student at Radcliffe and daughter of art critic Robert Langton Douglas. They had two children, Margaret Salinger (also known as Peggy – born December 10, 1955) and Matthew "Matt" Salinger (born February 13, 1960). Margaret Salinger wrote in her memoir Dream Catcher that she believes her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, had her father not read the teachings of Lahiri Mahasaya, a guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, which brought the possibility of enlightenment to those following the path of the "householder" (a married person with children). After their marriage, Salinger and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya Yoga in a small store-front Hindu temple in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1955. They received a mantra and breathing exercise to practice for 10 minutes twice a day.

Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she did. Certain elements of the story "Franny," published in January 1955, are based on his relationship with Claire, including her ownership of the book The Way of the Pilgrim. Because of their isolated location in Cornish and Salinger's proclivities, they hardly saw other people for long stretches of time. Claire was also frustrated by Salinger's ever-changing religious beliefs. Claire committed herself to Kriya yoga, but Salinger often left Cornish to work on a story "for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone or destroyed and some new 'ism' we had to follow." Claire believed "it was to cover the fact that Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn't face the quality of, or couldn't face publishing, what he had created."

Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961 and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. Each book contained two short stories or novellas published in The New Yorker between 1955 and 1959, and were the only stories Salinger had published since Nine Stories. On the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, Salinger wrote, in reference to his interest in privacy: "It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years."

On September 15, 1961, Time magazine devoted its cover to Salinger. In an article that profiled his "life of recluse", the magazine reported that the Glass family series "is nowhere near completion ... Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy." But Salinger published only one other thing after that: "Hapworth 16, 1924", a novella in the form of a long letter by seven-year-old Seymour Glass to his parents from summer camp. His first new work in six years, the novella took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker, and was universally panned by critics. Around this time, Salinger had isolated Claire from friends and relatives and made her—in Margaret Salinger's words—"a virtual prisoner". Claire separated from him in September 1966; their divorce was finalized on October 3, 1967.