Salinger, << SAL uhn juhr, >> J. D. (1919-2010), an American author, became famous for his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The novel’s hero and narrator is a prep school student named Holden Caulfield, who is expelled for failing grades. Adrift in New York City, Holden learns to face both the phoniness he finds in the adult world and his own weaknesses. In Catcher, and in much of the fiction that followed, Salinger humorously and convincingly captured the speech, gestures, and feelings of the young.
Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) introduces the Glass family, central figures of the author’s later works. One story in this book focuses on Seymour Glass, an eccentric genius whose suicide haunts the family in other fiction. In Franny and Zooey (1961), Franny Glass suffers a spiritual breakdown. Her brother Zooey blames his older brothers for Franny’s condition, but he draws on their wisdom to help her. Salinger also focused on Seymour in three stories first published in The New Yorker magazine. These stories are “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), “Seymour: An Introduction” (1959), and “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965).
Jerome David Salinger was born on Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. He isolated himself in rural New Hampshire from the 1950’s until his death on Jan. 27, 2010.
See also Catcher in the Rye, The.
