Jerome David Salinger was born in
New York City in 1919. The son of a wealthy
cheese importer, Salinger grew up in a fashionable neighborhood
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.
Many events from Salinger’s early life appear in The
Catcher in the Rye. For instance, Holden Caulfield moves
from prep school to prep school, is threatened with military school,
and knows an older Columbia student. In the novel, such autobiographical
details are transplanted into a post–World War II setting. The
Catcher in the Rye was published at a time when the burgeoning
American industrial economy made the nation prosperous and entrenched
social rules served as a code of conformity for the younger generation. Because
Salinger used slang and profanity in his text and because he discussed
adolescent sexuality in a complex and open way, many readers were
offended, and The Catcher in the Rye provoked great
controversy upon its release. Some critics argued that the book
was not serious literature, citing its casual and informal tone
as evidence. The book was—and continues to be—banned in some communities,
and it consequently has been thrown into the center of debates about
First Amendment rights, censorship, and obscenity in literature.
Though controversial, the novel appealed to a
great number of people. It was a hugely popular bestseller and general
critical success. Salinger’s writing seemed to tap into the emotions
of readers in an unprecedented way. As countercultural revolt began
to grow during the 1950s and 1960s, The
Catcher in the Rye was frequently read as a tale of an
individual’s alienation within a heartless world. Holden seemed
to stand for young people everywhere, who felt themselves beset
on all sides by pressures to grow up and live their lives according to
the rules, to disengage from meaningful human connection, and to restrict
their own personalities and conform to a bland cultural norm. Many
readers saw Holden Caulfield as a symbol of pure, unfettered individuality
in the face of cultural oppression.
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.
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