Welcome to our new column for 2024, “Happy Birthday.” Each month, I will select one author to feature during their birthday month. It’s no easy task because there are so many talented authors.
I want to begin with J.D. Salinger, an iconic figure, who wrote one of the most important works of the twentieth century, The Catcher in the Rye.
Few of us escaped our teenaged years without reading The Catcher in the Rye. Love him or hate him, everyone seems to know the name Holden Caulfield, the story’s protagonist.
Some critics argue that Franny and Zooey is Salinger’s finest work, but since it’s 1951 publication, The Catcher in the Rye has sold over 65 million copies despite being challenged or banned in some U.S. communities and several countries. About one million copies are still sold each year. It consistently ranks highly on critics lists of the best fiction books of all time.
Jerome David “J.D.” Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, in Manhattan. He died on January 27, 2010, at his long-time home in Cornish, New Hampshire. He attended public school until his parents moved to Park Avenue, and he was enrolled in private school. Salinger struggled to fit in at the McBirney School.
After he showed an interest in becoming an actor, his father shipped him off to the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Salinger was the literary editor of the school yearbook, a member of glee club, French club, aviation club, and the non-commissioned officer’s club (NCO club), but he was considered a mediocre student of average intelligence. While at the military academy, Salinger began writing stories after “lights out,” aided by a flashlight under the covers of his bed.
Salinger dropped out of New York University after his first year. Prodded by his father to choose a suitable career, Salinger accepted a job and traveled to Vienna and Austria to learn about the meat importing business. What he saw in the slaughterhouses sickened him, and Salinger became a life-long vegetarian. Salinger, who was raised Jewish, left Austria one month before Nazi Germany annexed it.
After one semester at Ursinus University in Pennsylvania, he enrolled at Columbia University where he took a writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor for Story magazine, who became Salinger’s friend and mentor for many years. Salinger’s first published work, “The Young Folks” appeared in Story in 1940.
In 1941, he briefly worked on a cruise ship as an activities director while submitting his short stories to The New Yorker. They rejected seven stories before finally accepting “Slight Rebellion off Madison” in December. The story was about an angst-ridden teenager named Holden Caulfield who suffered from anxiety that the U.S. would enter the war. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, his story was deemed unpublishable. The success he’d been chasing was suddenly ripped away by the war. The story would not be published until 1946.
In 1942, he began dating Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill until she left him for Charlie Chaplin. Later that year, Salinger was drafted into the army and 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 war, Salinger met Ernest Hemingway who was a war correspondent in Paris. Long a fan of Hemingway’s work, Salinger was impressed by his affable manner. Hemingway liked Salinger and recognized his talent.
Salinger was eventually assigned to a counter-intelligence unit known as the Ritchie Boys. Because he was fluent in French and German, he could interrogate prisoners of war. He was present when the Allies entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. The emotional strain of the war finally caught up with Salinger, and he spent time in a military hospital for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated.
During his time overseas, Salinger continued to write and submit stories to The New Yorker, but it rejected all his submission from 1944 to 1946. Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post did publish several of his stories.
For six months after Germany’s defeat, Salinger remained in Germany as part of counter-intelligence’s Denazification program. During that time, he met and married Sylvia Welter. Shortly after coming to the United States, Welter left Salinger and returned to Germany.
Whit Burnett offered to help Salinger publish a collection of short stories through Story Press’s Lippincott Imprint. When the deal fell apart, he blamed Burnett, and their friendship was damaged. This was not the first time Salinger felt let down by Burnett. In the early 1940s, Salinger sought Burnett’s help selling the screen rights to several of his stories. The first movie deal fell through and the second deal, based on “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” was renamed My Foolish Heart. The screenplay bore little resemblance to the story. It bombed at the box office and was panned by critics. Salinger was so enraged that he vowed to never allow any of his works to be adapted for film.
In 1951, Salinger was finally able to tell Holden Caufield’s story in The Catcher in the Rye. Critics reactions were mixed, but the public loved it. It became so popular with young readers that the literary world soon embraced Salinger’s genius.
Instead of finding joy in his success, Salinger felt uncomfortable with the sudden recognition and his loss of privacy. He began declining interviews and moved from New York To New Hampshire.
At first, Salinger reveled in his new community, often speaking at the local high school and hosting events at his home. He even agreed to be interviewed for the school newspaper. After the article was picked up by major news sources, Salinger terminated all contact with the school and stopped hosting events at his home.
In 1955, he married for the second time and had two children. His wife Claire, who was several years younger, was a senior at Radcliffe College. Salinger insisted she give up her studies, and she dropped out just four months short of graduation. He immediately cut Claire off from friends and family afraid she might abandon him as Oona O’Neill and his first wife had done. He became an avid follower of Zen Buddhism and convinced Claire to share his new faith.
Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961 and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in September 1961. Instead of focusing exclusively on his writing, the article detailed Salinger’s life as a recluse.
By 1967, Claire refused to tolerate his controlling behavior. After their divorce, Claire and the children remained in their home, and Salinger built a new house across the street to remain close to his children.
Salinger continued to write. His subjects were almost always teenagers and young adults. He felt more connected to issues that affected them.
In 1972, Salinger and Joyce Maynard began a relationship. She was 18, and he was 53. Maynard was already writing for Seventeen Magazine. They exchanged letters and he won her heart. Salinger discouraged her writing efforts warning of the pitfalls of fame and sudden success. He convinced her to drop out of Yale University to come live with him. He abruptly ended the relationship because Maynard wanted children, and he felt he was too old to be a parent again. Maynard later learned Salinger regularly corresponded with several attractive young women. One of those women, Colleen, became his third wife.
Despite offers from Hollywood powerhouses such as Samuel Goldwyn, Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein, and Steven Spielberg, Salinger would not allow The Catcher in the Rye to be adapted for film.
He also refused to publish any of the other stories he had written. In 1996, Salinger gave Orchises Press, a small publishing house, permission to publish one of his stories; however, the publicity the news generated caused him to withdraw his permission.
Joyce Maynard wrote extensively about Salinger in her memoir, At Home in the World, which was published in 1999 shortly after she auctioned off twenty-five of the letters Salinger wrote to her during their courtship.
In 2000, Salinger’s daughter Margaret published Dream Catcher: a Memoir. Margaret’s brother Matt immediately discredited the memoir asserting that his sister’s recollections of family life were nothing like his own.
Salinger died in 2010 of natural causes. In 2019, his widow Colleen and his son Matt announced that Salinger’s unpublished works were being catalogued for publication in the near future.
Best Known Works of J.D. Salinger:
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Nine Stories (1953) includes “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and other stories written between 1948 and 1953
Franny and Zooey (1961)
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
Collected Short Stories (2014)
· “The Young Folks” (1940)
· “Go See Eddie” (1940)
· “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (1944)
Many of Salinger’s short stories and essays published in magazines have not been put into collections and most of his work still remains unpublished.