Melville House Books

J.D. Salinger, fending off a photographer

Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger, famous for writing just a few, slim but beloved books in a few years followed by decades of reclusive, cantankerous silence, died yesterday at his home in Cornish, Vermont at the age of 91. Accorrding to a New York Times obituary written by one of his former editors at the New Yorker magazine, Charles McGrath, a statement issued by Salinger’s agent explained, “Despite having broken his hip in May, his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.â€

As McGrath nicely summarizes,

Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,†the collection “Nine Stories†and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey†and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.â€

“Catcher†was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.â€

… The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.†In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.â€

But although he dreamed for that level of success, notes McGrath,

…once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick†of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye†and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,†away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.â€

In the end, he stuck to his guns, spending his days mostly by himself or with his third wife, Coleen O’Neill. Numerous people reported he was still writing, just not publishing. Will that work be published now? His agent was not forthcoming, saying merely that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.â€

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.