J. D. Salinger facts for kids

Quick facts for kids J. D. Salinger
Salinger in 1950
Born	Jerome David Salinger (1919-01-01)January 1, 1919 New York City, U.S.
Died	January 27, 2010(2010-01-27) (aged 91) Cornish, New Hampshire, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist short-story writer
Education	New York University Ursinus College Columbia University
Notable works	The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Nine Stories (1953) Franny and Zooey (1961) Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
Spouse	Sylvia Welter ​ ​ (m. 1945; div. 1947)​ Claire Douglas ​ ​ (m. 1955; div. 1967)​ Colleen O'Neill ​ (m. 1988)​
Children	2, including Matt
Signature

Jerome David Salinger ( January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author 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 (1951) was an immediate success, 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.

Early life

Where Salinger grew up, 1133 Park Avenue in Manhattan

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York, on January 1, 1919. His father, Sol Salinger, traded in Kosher cheese, and was from a family of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, Sol's father having been 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 there 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 201 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 spring. That fall, his father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business, and he went to work at a company in Vienna and Bydgoszcz, Poland. Surprisingly, Salinger went willingly, but he was so disgusted by the slaughterhouses that he firmly decided to embark on a different career. His disgust for the meat business and rejection of his father likely influenced his vegetarianism as an adult. He left Austria one month before it was annexed by Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.

In the fall of 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.

World War II

In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding her immeasurably 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.

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

During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with 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.

Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit also known as the Ritchie Boys, in which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns. His war experiences affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." Both his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories, such as "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor", which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, publishing several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, including a group of 15 poems in 1945.

Postwar years

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 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work. "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 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 1951, his first novel The Catcher in the Rye was published. It became an immediate success.

Writing in the 1950s and move to Cornish

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" 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. Already tightening his grip on publicity, Salinger refused to allow publishers of the collection to depict his characters in dust jacket illustrations, lest readers form preconceived notions of them.

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 (342 Lang Road, 43°30′31″N 72°20′42″W / 43.508694°N 72.345129°W / 43.508694; -72.345129). 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. He also began to publish less often. After Nine Stories, he published only four stories in the rest of the decade, two in 1955 and one each in 1957 and 1959.

Second marriage

In February 1955, at age 36, Salinger married Claire Douglas (b. 1933), a Radcliffe student. They had two children, Margaret Salinger (also known as Peggy – born December 10, 1955) and Matthew "Matt" Salinger (born February 13, 1960).

Salinger also insisted that Claire drop out of school and live with him, only four months shy of graduation, which she did.

Salinger's family life was marked by discord after his first child was born.

The Salingers divorced in 1967, with Claire getting custody of the children. Salinger remained close to his family. He built a new house for himself across the road and visited frequently. He continued to live here (301 Lang Road, Cornish 43°30′44″N 72°21′54″W / 43.512284°N 72.364945°W / 43.512284; -72.364945) until his death.

Last publications

Salinger on the cover of Time (September 15, 1961)

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 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.

While living with Maynard, Salinger continued to write in a disciplined fashion, a few hours every morning. According to Maynard, by 1972 he had completed two new novels. In a 1974 interview with The New York Times, he said, "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing ... I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." According to Maynard, he saw publication as "a damned interruption". In her memoir, Margaret Salinger describes the detailed filing system her father had for his unpublished manuscripts: "A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant publish but edit first, and so on." A neighbor said that Salinger told him that he had written 15 unpublished novels.

Salinger was romantically involved with television actress Elaine Joyce for several years in the 1980s. The relationship ended when he met Colleen O'Neill, a nurse and quiltmaker, whom he married around 1988.

Death

Created for the cover of Time magazine, Robert Vickrey's 1961 portrait of Salinger was placed on view in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., after Salinger's death.

Salinger died from natural causes at his home in New Hampshire on January 27, 2010. He was 91.

Posthumous publications

Salinger wrote all his life. His widow and son began preparing this work for publication after his death, announcing in 2019 that "all of what he wrote will at some point be shared" but that it was a major undertaking and not yet ready.

Literary style and themes

In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote, "I almost always write about very young people", a statement that has been called his credo. Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940), to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass family stories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world." For this reason, Norman Mailer once remarked that Salinger was "the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school." Salinger's language, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were published and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work.

Salinger identified closely with his characters, and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue.

Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large", the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults, and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.

List of works

Books

• The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
• Nine Stories (1953)
  • "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948)
  • "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948)
  • "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (1948)
  • "The Laughing Man" (1949)
  • "Down at the Dinghy" (1949)
  • "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" (1950)
  • "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" (1951)
  • "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" (1952)
  • "Teddy" (1953)
• Franny and Zooey (1961), reworked from "Ivanoff, the Terrible" (1956)
  • "Franny" (1955)
  • "Zooey" (1957)
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
  • "Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters" (1955)
  • "Seymour: An Introduction" (1959)

Collected short stories

• Three Early Stories (2014)
  • "The Young Folks" (1940)
  • "Go See Eddie" (1940)
  • "Once a Week Won't Kill You" (1944)

• The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vol. 1 & 2 (1974) (Unauthorized Pirated (Bootleg) edition)

Published stories (uncollected)

• "The Hang of It" (1941, republished in The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors and Marines, 1943)
• "The Heart of a Broken Story" (1941)
• "Personal Notes of an Infantryman" (1942)
• "The Long Debut of Lois Taggett" (1942, republished in Stories: The Fiction of the Forties, ed. Whit Burnett, 1949)
• "The Varioni Brothers" (1943)
• "Both Parties Concerned" (1944)
• "Soft-Boiled Sergeant" (1944)
• "Last Day of the Last Furlough" (1944)
• "Elaine" (1945)
• "The Stranger" (1945)
• "I'm Crazy" (1945)
• "A Boy in France" (1945, republished in Post Stories 1942–45, ed. Ben Hibbs, 1946 and July/August 2010 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine), reworked from "What Babe Saw, or Ooh-La-La!" (1944)
• "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (1945, republished in The Armchair Esquire, ed. L. Rust Hills, 1959)
• "Slight Rebellion off Madison" (1946, republished in Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, ed. David Remnick, 2000)
• "A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All" (1947)
• "The Inverted Forest" (1947)
• "Blue Melody" (1948)
• "A Girl I Knew" (1948, republished in Best American Short Stories 1949, ed. Martha Foley, 1949)
• "Hapworth 16, 1924" (1965)

Unpublished stories

• "The Survivors" (1939)
• "The long hotel story" (1940)
• "The Fishermen" (1941)
• "Lunch for Three" (1941)
• "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler" (1941)
• "Monologue for a Watery Highball" (1941)
• "The Lovely Dead Girl at Table Six" (1941)
• "Mrs. Hincher" (1942), also known as "Paula"
• "The Kissless Life of Reilly" (1942)
• "The Last and Best of the Peter Pans" (1942)
• "Holden On the Bus" (1942)
• "Men Without Hemingway" (1942)
• "Over the Sea Let’s Go, Twentieth Century Fox" (1942)
• "The Broken Children" (1943)
• "Paris" (1943)
• "Rex Passard on the Planet Mars" (1943)
• "Bitsey" (1943)
• "What Got Into Curtis in the Woodshed" (1944)
• "The Children's Echelon" (1944), also known as "Total War Diary"
• "Boy Standing in Tennessee" (1944)
• "The Magic Foxhole" (1944)
• "Two Lonely Men" (1944)
• "A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt" (1944)
• "The Daughter of the Late, Great Man" (1945)
• "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" (1947)
• "Birthday Boy" (1946), also known as "The Male Goodbye"
• "The Boy in the People Shooting Hat" (1948)
• "A Summer Accident" (1949)
• "Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera" (1950)

Images for kids

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  Front cover and spine of The Catcher in the Rye, first edition

• 

  Margaret Salinger's memoir Dream Catcher, its cover featuring a rare photograph of Salinger and Margaret as a child

See also

In Spanish: J. D. Salinger para niños