January 28, 2010
J. D. Salinger, 1919-2010
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “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.”
Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:32 PM | Permalink
Comments
Secretive One-Hit wonder is dead at 91. Overrated.
Posted by: Pepito | Jan 28, 2010 3:17:07 PM
There's more than just A Catcher in the Rye that's great, but even if he was a one-hit wonder, it was a pretty big hit.
And given that most of us will die zero-hit non-wonders, his death is worth noting, and allowing oneself to feel sad about.
I do, anyway.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jan 28, 2010 4:00:17 PM
If only every writer that has one or two books in them would stop at one or two books.
Posted by: J.H. | Jan 28, 2010 4:13:16 PM
You got a point, though I still don't think 'Catcher in the Rye' is that good.
But that, of course, is just my very personal opinion.
Posted by: Pepito | Jan 28, 2010 4:13:34 PM
Cyril Connolly said, "It is the duty of every writer to write a masterpiece." Salinger did write one. People who think Salinger spent the last 50 years as a sad old windbag don't deny him his due in this way. I'm sorry you do, Pepito -- on this day of all days for such churlishness. There are many fields to which I would be ill-fitted to assess a life's contribution -- biochemistry, for one. It may be, Pepito, that you are similarly modestly equipped to assess a contribution to letters, despite your own excellent prose style. Salinger gave to the world splendid gifts -- I am sorry you cannot receive them.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 28, 2010 4:13:39 PM
Elatia:
You misunderstand me: I read Catcher in the Rye and I liked it. I thought it was a good book. But I just don't think it's a masterpiece. As you say, it may be that am modestly equipped to assess a contribution to letters (although to tell you the truth I don't think I am, regardless of my lack of credentials). Nevertheless, I understand it seems callous of me to say this on this particular day. Sorry for my incivility.
What I can honestly say about Salinger is that I think of 'Catcher in the Rye' as I think of most books by Hesse. Good books (and some of them very very good), but better when read as a teenager.
Posted by: Pepito | Jan 28, 2010 5:24:24 PM
Isn't it strange how someone who never lived will outlive us all? I'm talking about Holden, of course.
Posted by: wally | Jan 28, 2010 5:44:15 PM
What I can honestly say about Salinger is that I think of 'Catcher in the Rye' as I think of most books by Hesse. Good books (and some of them very very good), but better when read as a teenager.
So true. I recently went back and re-read my husband's nearly forty year old (and surprisingly intact) copy of Narziss and Goldmund. I regretted revisiting a book in my mature years that I had enjoyed so much in my late teens / early twenties. Fortunately, I haven't done the same with Catcher in the Rye.
It may be interesting to see what the publishing hounds discover among the late recluse's possessions. Of the two recently departed literary / social icons, I am going to miss Howard Zinn more.
Posted by: Ruchira | Jan 28, 2010 6:42:39 PM
Considering how much of a note the book struck and still strikes with younger people, I think Sallinger deserved his status. It's hard to overrate someone who writes something that resonates so much with so many people.
Posted by: jazz | Jan 28, 2010 7:29:46 PM
I think there are very few books that did not seem deeper, brighter, infinitely more portentous when I was in my teens and early twenties.
Perhaps we should give much more careful thought to which books we push at young people.
In my own warped memory, it is not Holden but the Glasses who still shine, and Howard Zinn was somehow a cousin. In different ways but somehow linked, they made it okay to be American.
Posted by: Zara | Jan 28, 2010 7:47:16 PM
Zara, Pepito, Ruchira and others --
Our reading lives -- unless we teach literature -- are set up to get us reading the classics in our late teens and again in our retirement years, as re-readers. A few years ago, I decided I would re-read the Russians, and the French and English novelists of the 19th century, before I got "that" old. What was, decades ago, a passionate immersion in literature and a rite of passage, is now inexpressibly moving, for as I read I see the great creating geniuses of the form lay the track beneath a moving train. They didn't change -- I did.
Well, no one is going to be comparing Salinger with Flaubert. Few will go back to Salinger (or Hesse), many times throughout their lives, always finding something new they had to be a little more of a grown-up to see. That is what makes the readerly relationship with Catcher and Franny & Zooey sad, intrinsically sad. Like friends of one's youth who died young, these books are both vivid and gone. Re-reading can be a futile exercise in table-tilting, in penetrating the barrier between worlds to hear once more the beloved lost voice. Really, it's better just to remember.
But not to condescend. For, if these books are like the friends of one's youth who died young, then they are not for that reason less -- just gone.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 29, 2010 12:34:46 AM
Elatia--
What I would give for a fraction of your graceful wisdom... in emulation, I guess I'll be rereading the classics urgently, and all those random and peculiarly formative second-tier encounters will remain history. Thanks. It is valuable advice.
Posted by: Zara | Jan 29, 2010 12:10:26 PM
Elatia,
You are right of course. I did not mean to denigrate enjoybale youthful experiences that don't thrill once again across the divide of decades. There is much that we loved as children but do not have any use for now. Why should some literature be an exception?
It is just that some books withstand the test of time and others fall flat on a re-read. I am guessing that Catcher in the Rye will be the latter for me now. That is not an indictment of the author necessarily, just the nature of the subject matter perhaps or its relevance to a particular time in history or one's own life. For example, Catch 22, which was absolutely amazing when I read it first in the late sixties seemed peculiarly disjointed when the middle aged women of my book club attempted to read it again a few years ago when the Iraq war was raging. But Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse 5 which I read again when Vonnegut died in 2007, remain perfectly satisfactory under the scrutiny of my more jaded second glance.
Posted by: Ruchira | Jan 29, 2010 12:58:04 PM
Catcher is on my daughter's 9th grade English syllabus, but they haven't gotten to it yet. I think I'll just re-experience the book vicariously, rather than re-read. How would he and J.D. react to being "taught" I wonder?
Elatia, did you read the Pevear translations? I'm ashamed to say I haven't read any of them yet. Maybe I'll get to it this year.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Jan 29, 2010 2:00:32 PM
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