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J. D Salinger

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Jerome David Salinger (/ˈsælɪndʒər/; January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye.

Quick facts: Born, Died …
Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which became home to much of his later work.

The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 and became 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. The novel was widely read and controversial.

The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961); and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled "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 Margaret Salinger, his daughter.

Early life
1133 Park Avenue in Manhattan, where Salinger grew up
Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan, New York on January 1, 1919. His father, Sol Salinger, sold kosher cheese, and was from a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent, his own father having been the rabbi for the Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Salinger's mother, Marie (née Jillich), was born in Atlantic, Iowa, of German, Irish, and Scottish descent, but changed her name to Miriam and considered herself Jewish after marrying Salinger's father. Salinger did not learn that his mother was not of Jewish ancestry until just after he celebrated his bar mitzvah. He had only one sibling, an older sister, Doris (1912–2001).

In his youth, Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan. Then in 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue, and Salinger was enrolled at the McBurney School, a nearby private school. Salinger had trouble fitting in at his new school and took measures to conform, such as calling himself Jerry. His family called him Sonny. At McBurney, he managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper and appeared in plays. He "showed an innate talent for drama," though his father opposed the idea of his becoming an actor. His parents then enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Salinger began writing stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight". Salinger was the literary editor of the class yearbook, Crossed Sabres. He also participated in the Glee Club, Aviation Club, French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.

Salinger's Valley Forge 201 file reveals that he was a "mediocre" student, and unlike the overachievement enjoyed by members of the Glass family about whom he wrote, his recorded IQ between 111 and 115 was slightly above average. He graduated in 1936. Salinger started his freshman year at New York University in 1936. He considered studying special education but dropped out the following spring. That fall, his father urged him to learn about the meat-importing business, and he went to work at a company in the Austrian city of Vienna and the Polish city of Bydgoszcz. Surprisingly, Salinger went willingly, but he was so disgusted by the slaughterhouses that he firmly decided to embark on a different career path. His disgust for the meat business and his rejection of his father most likely influenced his vegetarianism as an adult. He left Austria one month before it was annexed by Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.[citation needed]

In the fall of 1938, Salinger attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and wrote a column called "skipped diploma," which included movie reviews. He dropped out after one semester. In 1939, Salinger attended the Columbia University School of General Studies in Manhattan, where he took a writing class taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine. According to Burnett, Salinger did not distinguish himself until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, at which point "he suddenly came to life" and completed three stories. Burnett told Salinger that his stories were skillful and accomplished, accepting "The Young Folks," a vignette about several aimless youths, for publication in Story. Salinger's debut short story was published in the magazine's March–April 1940 issue. Burnett became Salinger's mentor, and they corresponded for several years.

World War II
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. Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married. In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly as a performer.

The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. Seven of Salinger's stories were rejected by the magazine that year, including "Lunch for Three," "Monologue for a Watery Highball," and "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler." In December 1941, however, the publication accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters". When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered "unpublishable." Salinger was devastated. Later, in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, he wrote, "I think I'll hate 1942 till I die, just on general principles." The story did not appear in The New Yorker until 1946. In the spring of 1942, several months after the United States entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the army, wherein he 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 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. Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two writers began corresponding; Salinger wrote to Hemingway in July 1946 explaining that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war. Salinger added that he was working on a play about Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of his story "Slight Rebellion off Madison," and hoped to play the part himself.

Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit also known as the Ritchie Boys for which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. In April 1945 he entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau. Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant and served in five campaigns. Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and he later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." Both of his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories, 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 alone.

Post-war years
After Germany's defeat, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "Denazification" duty in Germany 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. 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."

In 1946, Whit Burnett agreed to help Salinger publish a collection of his short stories through Story Press's Lippincott Imprint. Titled The Young Folks, the collection was to consist of twenty stories—ten, like the title story and "Slight Rebellion off Madison," were already in print; ten were previously unpublished. Though Burnett implied the book would be published and even negotiated Salinger a $1,000 advance on its sale, Lippincott overruled Burnett and rejected the book. Salinger blamed Burnett for the book's failure to see print, and the two became estranged.

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

In 1947, the author submitted a short story titled simply "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 accepted the story, now titled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and published it in the January 31, 1948 issue. The magazine thereon offered Salinger a "first-look" contract that allowed them right of first refusal on any future stories. 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. "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. Salinger eventually published seven stories about the Glasses, developing a detailed family history and focusing particularly on Seymour, the brilliant but troubled eldest child.

In the early 1940s, Salinger had confided in a letter to Whit Burnett that he was eager to sell the film rights to some of his stories in order to achieve financial security. 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." Though Salinger sold his story with the hope—in the words of his agent Dorothy Olding—that it "would make a good movie," the film version of "Wiggily" was lambasted by critics upon its release in 1949. Renamed My Foolish Heart and starring Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward, the melodramatic film departed to such an extent from Salinger's story that Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg referred to it as a "bastardization." As a result of this experience, Salinger never again permitted film adaptations to be made from his work. When Brigitte Bardot wanted to buy the rights to "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", Salinger refused the request, 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."

Salinger Story Salinger's Short Published Burnett Family Film