J.D. Salinger: 1919 - 2010

Published Feb. 5, 2010 at 4:40 p.m.
In Memoriam
J.D. Salinger was 91 when he died in his New Hampshire home on January 27, 45 years after he published his last known story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in the New Yorker...

J.D. Salinger was 91 when he died in his New Hampshire home on January 27, 45 years after he published his last known story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in the New Yorker. He was often called the Greta Garbo of the writing world (she, too, retired from the public eye with roughly half of her life before her), and like Garbo's, his achievements have often seemed to be eclipsed by the mystique of his reclusiveness. He published only four slim volumes, two in the early '50s, two in the early '60s: one novel, nine short stories, and two collections containing a pair each of longer stories. (He didn't reprint "Hapworth 16, 1924" in book form.)

But he was a magical writer whose characters — though some of them bore superficial resemblance to Fitzgerald's, O'Hara's, and Updike's — had a spiritual and emotional restlessness and spoke in a brittle, reflective prose all their own. The most famous, of course, is Holden Caulfield, the teen hero of Salinger's first book, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which is still popular. My college friends and I theorized that the interior life of every American adolescent approximated either Holden's or that of Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. Frankie is the artist as a young woman, her loneliness driving her to seek connection with everyone in the wide world. Holden is the teenager as misanthrope, distrustful of almost everyone, ever on the lookout for phonies. If you encounter him for the first time at 15 or 16, chances are you won't question his point of view, though it's clear that Salinger does, whatever his empathy for his wayward protagonist.

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