J.D. Salinger, well known author of the classic novel The Catcher in The Rye, has passed away at age 91. The author died of natural causes at his home Wednesday January 27, 2010. News that JD Salinger died has become the talk of the literary world today.
It may surprise many casual fans of the novel, that Salinger's only novel was The Catcher in the Rye. The popularity of the novel grew to a large level. At one point, Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon in 1980, said he did the murderous act to promote reading of Catcher in the Rye. John Hinckley Jr., the man who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, left a copy of the book in his hotel room. These are obviously two fans who Salinger would not want to recognize, but there were many more who were in the right frame of mind and enjoyed his literary work.
The story told the tale of Holden Caulfield, who eventually become the hero of disenchanted youth everywhere, because Salinger's character came into popularity just as American teenage culture was emerging. Interestingly, Holden Caufield was also a character that Salinger wrote about in a story he sent to The New Yorker, but it never was published officially in their pages.
The majority of JD Salinger's other works were in fact stories he had published to New Yorker, staring in 1948. His last was published in 1964, and then he apparently became more of a hermit, rejecting the idea of his fame as an author. Even though there is news of the author's death, it's his classic that will keep his memory living on. Even though there is sad news that J.D. Salinger died, Catcher in the Rye will live on as a literary classic which the author who refused to accept fame is well known for.
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Comments: 2
King Dork:
“The title of Catcher in the Rye comes from a misquoted poem by Robert Burns, which Holden Caulfied elaborates into a mystical fantasy about saving children from falling off a cliff. There are all these kids playing in a field of rye, and he stands guard ready to catch them if they stray from the field. A lot of people have found this to be a very moving metaphor for the experience of growing up, or anxiety about the loss of innocence, or the Mysterious Dance of Life. Or any random thing, really.
To use HC’s own terminology, it has always seemed pretty goddam phony and all to me. Fantasies about Jane Gallagher’s preppie ass? Check – even I have those. Fantasies about twisting yourself into a tortured symbol of the precious authenticity of youth? I don’t think so. It’s the kind of thing you’d make up to impress an AP teacher. And the AP teachers are duly impressed with it, of course. Suckers.
The brilliance of it, though, is that the people in the Catcher Cult manage to see themselves as everybody in the scenario all at once. They’re the cute, virtuous kids playing in the rye, and they also like to see themselves as the troubled but famous misfit adolescent who dreams of preserving the kids’ innocence by force and who turns out to have been right all along. And they also like to see themselves as the grown-up moralistic busy-body with the kid-sized butterfly net who is charged with keeping all the kids on the premises, no matter what. Somehow, they don’t realize you can’t root for them all.”