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Biography of J.D. Salinger (1919-)
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J.D. Salinger

Born in New York City on the first day of 1919, J.D. Salinger is the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother. After brief periods of enrollment at both NYU and Columbia University, Salinger devoted himself entirely to writing, and by 1940 he had published several short stories in periodicals. Although his career as a writer was interrupted by World War II, after returning from service in the U.S. Army in 1946 Salinger resumed a writing career primarily for The New Yorker magazine. Some of his most notable stories include his first story for The New Yorker entitled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948), the tale of the suicide of a despairing war veteran and "For Esm? ? With Love and Squalor" (1950), which describes a U.S. soldier's encounter with two British children. In total, Salinger published thirty-five short stories in various publications, including many in the Saturday Evening Post, Story, and Colliers between 1940 and 1948, and The New Yorker from 1948 until 1965.

Salinger received major critical and popular recognition with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the story of Holden Caulfield, a rebellious boarding school student who attempts to run away from the adult world that he finds "phony." In many ways reminiscent of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Salinger's novel finds great sympathy for its wayward child protagonist. Salinger's only novel drew from characters he had already created in two short stories published in 1945 and 1946, "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" and "I'm Crazy." The latter story is an alternate take on several of the chapters in The Catcher in the Rye.

Salinger followed The Catcher in the Rye with Nine Stories (1953), a selection of his best literary work, and Franny and Zooey in 1961, which draws from two earlier stories in The New Yorker. In 1963 he published several of his short stories as a novel, Raise the High Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. His relatively small literary output and reclusive habits since that time has made Salinger the subject of a great deal of notoriety.

Since 1953, Salinger has resided in Cornish, New Hampshire, and claims that he continues to write. Although details about Salinger are notoriously vague because of his reclusive nature, which has made him the subject of a great deal of speculation. Salinger refuses to give interviews or to deal with the press. Personal information about Salinger is therefore limited but in great demand. Letters written by Salinger to a young woman with whom he had an affair gained a $156,000 auction price at Sotheby's. In these letters written in 1972, Salinger writes to Joyce Maynard, then an eighteen year old student at Yale University who later left college to live with Salinger for nine months. These letters trace his growing attachment to Maynard and deal with the necessity of guarding and protecting the writer's source of creativity from the glare of the outside world. Maynard later became a published writer herself, publishing the comic novel To Die For and, in controversial move, publishing a memoir concerning her relationship with Salinger that implied that Salinger's demand for privacy stemmed from his awareness that his activities, such as several relationships with young women such as Maynard, would mar his reputation.
 

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