J.D. Salinger, author was 91

Salinger died Wednesday at the home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. From the New York Times:

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.”

“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.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

Also: Jonathan Kirsch at 12:12, his book blog for the Jewish Journal:

The death of Jerome David Salinger brings to an end one of the great lives in American letters. For me, and for generations after me, “The Catcher in the Rye” is much more than an “evergreen” best-seller; it is truly a rite of passage, as much for my own children as it was for me. I studied the text of “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories” with the devotion of a Talmudic scholar, and I recall how the publication of a new short story by J. D. Salinger in the pages of The New Yorker in 1965 was a rare and much-anticipated event.

J. D. Salinger is all the more remarkable because he so resolutely rejected the celebrity that was his for the asking.

Graphic: New York Times