First Zinn, now my second favorite literary recluse, J.D. Salinger. Given Salinger’s nonexistent output since Hapworth 16, 1924, the broad strokes were probably written years ago, but here’s a snip from today’s obit in the New York Times:
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. Despite having broken his hip in May, the agency said, 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.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?Ѣll 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.
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Salinger On Why Catcher Will Never Be A Movie