Salinger, J. D. (redirected from Salinger)

Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David Salinger) (săl`ĭnjər), 1919–, American novelist and short-story writer, b. New York City. Salinger depicts the loneliness and frustration of individuals caught in a world of banalities and restricting conformity. His best-known work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is a picaresque novel that describes the adventures of a schoolboy at odds with society. It remains an extremely popular novel among adolescents, who view it as a testament to the purity and honesty of youth. Many of his short stories concern the Glass family, presented by Salinger as overly sensitive people in a materialistic world. In 1965, Salinger retreated from public life, winning an injunction in 1987 against a researcher who intended to publish excerpts of his letters. Collections of his stories, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine, include Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963), and Seymour, An Introduction (1963).

Bibliography

See memoir, Dream Catcher (2000), by his daughter, M. A. Salinger; biography by I. Hamilton (1989); studies by G. Rosen (1977) and W. French (1988).

---

Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David) (1919–  ) writer; born in New York City. He graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy (1936) and studied at New York University, Ursinus College, and Columbia University. He began to write when young, worked as an entertainer on a cruise ship (1941), served in the Army (1942–46), and began to publish short stories. The Catcher in the Rye (1951), his first and only novel, was an immediate success, generating a cult-like dedication among many readers. His subsequent collections of short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, such as Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), raised more speculation about the elusive author. Critics have been puzzled by his work—he is considered to be either too intellectual or too sentimental, a supreme stylist or a didactic practitioner of self-absorbed musings. He also ended up as something of a media preoccupation by virtue of his becoming a recluse for most of his adult life; about all that was ever known of his personal life was that he lived and wrote in Cornish, N.H.