J.D.Salinger--Catcher in the Rye

 

Jerome David Salinger (/ˈsælɪndʒər/; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Before its publication, Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine^[1] and served 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.^{[citation needed]}

The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. Salinger's depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers.^[2] The novel was widely read and controversial,^[a] 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: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and his daughter Margaret Salinger. 

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.^[25] Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married.^[26] In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly a performer.^[27]

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".^[28] 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.^[28] 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.^[27] He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.^[29][13]

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.^[30] Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona.^[31] Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent."^[2] The two began corresponding; Salinger wrote to Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war,^[31] and added that he was working on a play about Caulfield and hoped to play the part himself.^[31]

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.^[32] In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant^[33] and served in five campaigns.^[34] His war experiences affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated,^[35][36] 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."^[32] Both his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,^[37] 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.

 

After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "Denazification" duty in Germany^[38] 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.^[39] 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."^[40]

In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint.^[41] 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.^[41] Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book.^[41] Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.^[42]

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"^[2] and arranged a meeting with Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[43] 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.^[44] "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.^[45] Salinger published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.^[45]

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.^[46] 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."^[46] Though Salinger sold the story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it "would make a good movie",^[47] critics lambasted the film upon its release in 1949.^[48] 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."^[48] As a result of this experience, Salinger never again permitted film adaptations of his work.^[49] When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", Salinger refused, but told his friend Lillian Ross, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, "She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport."

In the 1940s, Salinger confided to several people that he was working on a novel featuring Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of his short story "Slight Rebellion off Madison",^[51] and Little, Brown and Company published The Catcher in the Rye on July 16, 1951.^[52] The novel's plot is simple,^[53] detailing 16-year-old Holden's experiences in New York City after his fourth expulsion and departure from an elite college preparatory school.^[54] The book is more notable for the persona and testimonial voice of its first-person narrator, Holden.^[55] He serves as an insightful but unreliable narrator who expounds on the importance of loyalty, the "phoniness" of adulthood, and his own duplicity.^[55] 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."^[56]

Initial reactions to the book were mixed, ranging from The New York Times hailing Catcher as "an unusually brilliant first novel"^[57] to denigrations of the book's monotonous language and Holden's "immorality and perversion"^[58] (he uses religious slurs and freely discusses casual sex and prostitution).^[59] 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.^[53] The book's initial success was followed by a brief lull in popularity, but by the late 1950s, according to his 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."^[60] It has been compared to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.^[61] Newspapers began publishing articles about the "Catcher Cult",^[60] 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".^[62] 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.^[62]

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).^[63][64] 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".^[65]

Mark David Chapman, who shot singer-songwriter John Lennon in December 1980, was obsessed with the book. His main motive was his frustration with Lennon's lifestyle and public statements, as well as delusions he suffered related to Holden Caulfield.^[66][67]

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.^[48] Since its publication, there has been sustained interest in the novel among filmmakers, with Billy Wilder,^[68] Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg^[69] 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."^[70] 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).^[71] In letters from the 1940s, Salinger expressed his admiration of three living, or recently deceased, writers: Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald;^[72] Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor".^[73] Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has an ending similar to that of Fitzgerald's story "May Day."^[74]

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.^[75] 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.^[76][77] Salinger's religious studies were reflected in some of his writing. The story "Teddy" features a ten-year-old child who expresses Vedantic insights.^[78] 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."^[76]

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.^[79] The book received grudgingly positive reviews, and was a financial success—"remarkably so for a volume of short stories," according to Hamilton.^[80] Nine Stories spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller list.^[80] 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.^{[citation needed]}

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,^[81] 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.^[82] 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.^[82] He was also seen less frequently around town, meeting only one close friend—jurist Learned Hand—with any regularity.^[83] 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.  Wikipedia