J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan in 1919, the son of a prosperous Jewish father in the kosher cheese and meat import business and a mother of Irish-Catholic descent who passed for Jewish within the marriage. He drifted through schools, washed out of NYU, finally took a writing course at Columbia with Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine, who published his first piece in 1940. By the early 1940s he was placing slick fiction in Collier's and Esquire and pestering The New Yorker, which finally took "Slight Rebellion off Madison" — an early sketch of a young man named Holden Caulfield — in 1941, though the war delayed its publication until 1946.

He was drafted in 1942 and served in the Counter Intelligence Corps of the 4th Infantry Division, landing on Utah Beach on D-Day, fighting through the catastrophic American campaign in the Hürtgen Forest, and helping to liberate a subcamp of Dachau in the spring of 1945. He carried six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye through the war in his pack. Shortly after V-E Day he checked himself into a hospital in Nuremberg for what was then called combat-stress reaction; he wrote to Hemingway, whom he had met in liberated Paris, that he was in "an almost constant state of despondency." He never spoke publicly about the war again, but his daughter Margaret and several biographers later identified it as the central unhealed wound of his life.

The Catcher in the Rye appeared in 1951 and made him famous in a way he was visibly unprepared for. Holden Caulfield — sixteen, expelled from prep school, wandering Manhattan over three days in a fugue of grief for his dead brother Allie and disgust at adult "phoniness" — became the defining voice of postwar American adolescence. Nine Stories (1953) collected the best of his magazine work, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which the war-damaged Seymour Glass kills himself in a Florida hotel room. Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) extended the Glass family saga into increasingly long, increasingly digressive meditations on spiritual crisis.

In 1953 he bought a house in Cornish, New Hampshire, and withdrew. He published one more story — "Hapworth 16, 1924" in The New Yorker in 1965 — and then nothing for the remaining forty-five years of his life. He sued people who tried to write about him, refused interviews, blocked an unauthorized biography. His relationship with the eighteen-year-old Joyce Maynard in 1972–73, which she described in her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, and his daughter Margaret's 2000 memoir Dream Catcher — which described a household organized around his various spiritual enthusiasms (Vedanta, Christian Science, Scientology, homeopathy, macrobiotics) and his coldness toward his children — complicated the saintly recluse legend considerably. Since his death in 2010, his son Matt has periodically said unpublished manuscripts exist and will eventually be released; nothing has yet appeared, and the silence at this point feels like part of the work.