Getting to know J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)*

*All information taken from shmoop.com

What J.D. Salinger did... and why you should care

J.D. Salinger did not want you to read this biography. In the half-century after he published his masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger became almost as well-known for his fiercely-guarded privacy as for his book about the prep school dropout who hates phonies and loves to swear. Salinger—who passed away at the age of 91 on January 27, 2010—never published anything new after 1965. He shunned publicity, didn't give interviews, and was known to point a shotgun at people who got too close to his New Hampshire home. His aversion to the spotlight, however, did nothing to dim his legacy as one of the most unique literary voices of the twentieth century.

Writing Catcher in the Rye On July 16, 1951, J.D. Salinger's first and

only full-length novel was published. He had been working on it for ten years. Its title was The Catcher in the Rye. It is the story of Holden Caulfield, a foul-mouthed prep school dropout who is completely terrified of growing up. After getting kicked out (again) from a fancy private boarding school, Holden spends three days wandering around New York City, torn between the nostalgic memories of childhood and the bitter, cynical world he sees around him now. Salinger rants in the voice of his 16-year-old narrator, creating a perfect blend of bitter teenage angst and childlike vulnerability.

Trivia The Catcher in the Rye is on Time magazine's

list of the All-Time 100 Novels (which, technically, is a list of the top 100 novels written since 1923, in English. Still, it's a big accomplishment.)

Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon in 1980, was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. He brought the book with him to the murder scene and read a few pages while waiting for the police. He later released a statement that said, "The reason I killed John Lennon was to promote the reading of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.”

Trivia Holden Caulfield's constant worrying about the

status of Central Park's ducks in the winter is apparently contagious. The Central Park Conservancy fields frequent questions about this topic from recent Catcher in the Rye readers. "People are always calling and asking, 'Where do the ducks go?’" conservancy historian Sara Cedar Miller told a newspaper in 2009. "I say, 'Did you just finish reading 'The Catcher in the Rye'? The answer is always yes." (For the record, they migrate to warmer climates, just like any other ducks).

Holden Caulfield's cursing habit and frank talk about sex has made The Catcher in the Rye> one of the most frequently banned books of the last fifty years.

“Literary giant who made silence an art” New York Times

1. When did Salinger write Catcher in the Rye?

2. What was CIR to generations of men and women in the years after WWII?

3. What does the author mean when he says Holden Caulfield is the “teenage Everyman”?

4. What is literary irony?5. What is one piece of evidence from the

article that Salinger was a “crackpot”?