J. D. Salinger Biography

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City in 1919. The son of a wealthy cheese importer, Salinger grew up in Manhattan and spent his youth being shuttled between various prep schools before his parents finally settled on the Valley Forge Military Academy in 1934. He graduated from Valley Forge in 1936 and attended a number of colleges, including Columbia University, but did not graduate from any of them. While at Columbia, Salinger took a creative writing class in which he excelled, cementing the interest in writing that he had maintained since his teenage years. Salinger had his first short story published in 1940; he continued to write as he joined the army and fought in Europe during World War II. Upon his return to the United States and civilian life in 1946, Salinger wrote more stories, publishing them in many respected magazines. In 1951, Salinger published his only full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which propelled him onto the national stage.

In the same year that The Catcher in the Rye appeared, Salinger published a short story in The New Yorker magazine called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which proved to be the first in a series of stories about the fictional Glass family. Over the next decade, other “Glass” stories appeared in the same magazine: “Franny,” “Zooey,” and “Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters.” These and other stories are available in the only other books Salinger published besides The Catcher in the Rye: Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction(1963). Though Nine Stories received some critical acclaim, the critical reception of the later stories was hostile. Critics generally found the Glass siblings to be ridiculously and insufferably precocious and judgmental.

Beginning in the early 1960s, as his critical reputation waned, Salinger began to publish less and to disengage from society. In 1965, after publishing another Glass story (“Hapworth 26, 1924”) that was widely reviled by critics, he withdrew almost completely from public life, a stance he has maintained up to the present. This reclusiveness, ironically, made Salinger even more famous, transforming him into a cult figure. To some degree, Salinger’s cult status has overshadowed, or at least tinged, many readers’ perceptions of his work. As a recluse, Salinger, for many, embodied much the same spirit as his precocious, wounded characters, and many readers view author and characters as the same being. Such a reading of Salinger’s work clearly oversimplifies the process of fiction writing and the relationship between the author and his creations. But, given Salinger’s iconoclastic behavior, the general view that Salinger was himself a sort of Holden Caulfield is understandable.

The few brief public statements that Salinger made before his death in 2010 suggested that he continued to write stories, implying that the majority of his works might not appear until after his death. Meanwhile, readers have become more favorably disposed toward Salinger’s later writings, meaning that The Catcher in the Rye may one day be seen as part of a much larger literary whole.

J. D. Salinger Study Guides

The Catcher in the Rye

Published

Franny and Zooey

Published

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Published

J. D. Salinger Quotes

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

Mothers are all slightly insane.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

J. D. Salinger Novels

The Catcher in the Rye

Published 1951

Franny and Zooey

Published 1961

J. D. Salinger Short Fiction

Nine Stories

Published 1953

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

Published 1948

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”

Published 1948

“Just Before the War with the Eskimos”

Published 1948

“The Laughing Man”

Published 1949

“Down at the Dinghy”

Published 1949

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”

Published 1950

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”

Published 1951

“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”

Published 1952

“Teddy”

Published 1953

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