J. D. Salinger, the obsessively private author who captured the hearts of several generations with his pitch-perfect knowledge of adolescence and his ear for the vernacular, died on Jan. 28. "The Catcher in the Rye" is his best-known work.
Mr. Salinger, who was born on Jan. 1, 1919 in Manhattan, has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish. N.H. for more than half a century. He has not been photographed in decades.
Mr. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" caused a sensation when it was published. With its very first sentence, the book, which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. "Nine Stories," published in 1953, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.
In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. "Franny and Zooey," a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction," appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger's to appear in print was "Hapworth 16, 1924," a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. The story, which came out in book form in 1997, continued, and perhaps even completed, the saga of the strangely dysfunctional Glass family. In the '70s Mr. Salinger stopped giving interviews, and in the late '80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.
Mr. Salinger has sued repeatedly over the years to protect his privacy and the sanctity of his work. In the latest case, a federal district judge in Manhattan on July 1, 2009, indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfied, the querulous, precocious protagonist of "The Catcher in the Rye." In a copyright infringement lawsuit, Mr. Salinger's lawyers had called the new novel, "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," "a rip-off pure and simple." The book is written by Fredrick Colting, a 33-year-old humor writer who uses the pseudonym J. D. California. Mr. Colting said he would appeal the ruling.
The book might be read as an update of sorts to "The Catcher in the Rye," which has sold more than 35 million copies. The new work centers on a 76-year-old "Mr. C.," the creation of a writer named Mr. Salinger. Although the name Holden Caulfield does not appear in the book, Mr. C. is clearly Holden, the skinny, smart-mouthed prep school dropout in "The Catcher in the Rye" and one of the most enduring adolescent figures in American literature, as an old man. A lawyer for Mr. Colting described the new book as a commentary on and a critique of "The Catcher in the Rye" that depicted Mr. Salinger as a prisoner of his own words.
Mr. Salinger's carefully guarded privacy was breached in 1999 by the auction of letters that Mr. Salinger wrote in the early 1970s to the writer Joyce Maynard, with whom Mr. Salinger had a nine-month romance. It began when she was an 18-year-old Yale University freshman and Mr. Salinger was a celebrated 53-year-old author who had retreated from public life to an isolated cottage in New Hampshire. The letters were bought by the California software entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Norton, who returned them to Mr. Salinger.
One year later, in 2000, Mr. Salinger's daughter, Margaret, came out with a memoir, "Dream Catcher," that revealed previously unknown and deeply intimate aspects of her father's life. Ms. Salinger said her father was pathologically self-centered, and that nothing could interrupt his work, which he likened to a quest for enlightenment. Ms. Salinger said her father was also abusive to his second wife and her mother, Claire Douglas, keeping her a virtual prisoner in his house in Cornish, N.H., refusing to allow her to see friends and family.
Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science, according to the daughter. He also drank urine, and sat in a Reichian orgone box, Ms. Salinger wrote. He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls.
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