JD Salinger Essay Research Paper Jerome David

J.D. Salinger Essay, Research Paper

Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 in New York City. His parents were Sol and Marie Salinger. He had an older sister named Doris. There is very little personal information about Salinger because of his insistence on protecting his privacy.

J. D. earned average grades in grade school. At age thirteen, Salinger was enrolled in the prestigious McBurney School in Manhattan, but he was dismissed with failing grades after a year. He graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy. This school was the model for The Catcher in the Rye’s Pencey Prep. There he wrote his first stories. He attended Ursinus University in Pennsylvania, but dropped out in the middle of his first semester. He instead took a course in short story writing at Columbia.

In 1942, Salinger was drafted into the army. He was a member of the Fourth Army Division that made D-Day famous. After WWII, he was hospitalized in Germany for psychiatric treatment. While in Germany, he met one of his heroes, Ernest Hemingway. He returned to the U. S. in 1947.

In 1951, Salinger’s only full-length novel was published. However, it was the work that made him famous, and still sells some 250,000 copies annually. The novel took its title from a line by Robert Burns, in which the protagonist Holden Caulfied misquoting it sees himself as a ‘catcher in the rye’ who must keep the world’s children from falling off ’some crazy cliff’. The .Catcher in the Rye. is a story of a sixteen-year-old hero-narrator Holden Caulfield. He is full of despair and loneliness because of the “phony” post war era in which he is living. Knowing that he is about to be expelled from prep school for poor grades, Holden decides to run away just before Christmas. He spends the next few days wandering in New York City, describing in a mixture of schoolboy slang and poetry, his feelings about himself, his family, the world that surrounds him, and his quest for the true, the good, the real, and the innocent. Holden is thought by many to be the most similar to the author.

In 1953, he moved to Cornish, New Hampshire into a cottage overlooking the Connecticut River. Here he allowed himself to be interviewed by sixteen-year-old Shirley Blaney for the New Hampshire Daily Eagle. When he first moved to New Hampshire, Salinger spent a lot of his spare time with local teenagers; it was in 1953 that he published .Nine Stories., a collection of short stories introducing the Glass family. Salinger published three other stories containing the Glass family; .Franny and Zooey.(1961), Raise High the Roof Beam(1963), and The Carpenters(1964).

On February 17, 1955, J. D. married Claire Douglas. .Franny. was written for her as a wedding present. J. D. and Claire had two children, Matthew and Peggy. The couple divorced in 1967. Since the late 80s Salinger has been married to Colleen O’Neill.

Over the years, Salinger withdrew from the public eye. He always refused to sign autographs, give lectures, give interviews, never consented to be in .Who’s Who., and kept an unlisted phone number. To protect his privacy, he built a fence surrounding his house. One neighbor said, “You can only get as far as the garage. The only way to get to the house is by going through a 50-foot cement tunnel from the garage. The tunnel is patrolled by dogs, and the house is situated on a hill so he could see you coming for miles.”

Because of J. D. Salinger’s insistence on persevering his privacy and the willingness of his family and friends to assist him in doing so, little biographical information on Salinger is available, especially regarding his later life. Moreover, Salinger’s habit of deliberately misleading would-be biographers with false information further complicates the picture; nevertheless, some elements of Salinger’s biography are generally accepted as true.

Rumors spread from time to time, that Salinger will publish another novel, but from late 60’s he has successfully avoided publicity. “I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” said Salinger in 1974 to a New York Times correspondent. However, according to Joyce Maynard, who was close to the author for a long time from the 1970s, Salinger still writes, but nobody is allowed to see the work.

Jerry Burt of Plainfield, N.H., who was friends with Salinger in the 1960s and lives near the author, told The Associated Press that Salinger said in 1978 that he’d written 15 or 16 other books. Burt said the books were apparently hidden in a walk-in safe in Salinger’s home. During a visit, he saw the safe open, but said it was dark inside and he couldn.t tell if there were any books. “He told me he had his finished manuscripts in there,” Burt said. “I didn’t see them. Who knows now. He may have burned them all. He may have published them under another name. He didn’t have any idea at the time what he was going to do with them. J. D. loathes the corporate aspects of publishing. He has had his agents burn or throw away his correspondence.

Some of his works include .A Perfect Day for Bananafish., which introduced Seymour Glass, who commits suicide; .Franny and Zooey.; .Raise the High Roof Beam.; .Carpenters.; .Seymour: An Introduction.; .Nine Stories., and .Hapworth 16, 1924..

.The Catcher in the Rye., the only Salinger book that I have had the pleasure of reading, has been co