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J.D. Salinger was born and grew
up in the fashionable apartment
district of Manhattan, New York.
He was the son of a prosperous
Jewish importer of kosher cheese
and his Scotch-Irish wife. In
his childhood the young Jerome
was called Sonny. The family
had a beautiful apartment on
Park Avenue. After restless
studies in prep schools, he
was sent to Valley Forge Military
Academy (1934-36), which he
attended briefly. His friends
from this period remember his
sarcastic wit.
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In 1937 when he was
eighteen and nineteen,
Salinger spent five
months in Europe. From
1937 to 1938 he studied
at Ursinus College and
New York University.
He fell in love with
Oona O'Neill, wrote
her letters almost daily,
and was later shocked
when she married Charles
Chaplin, who was much
older than she. In 1939
Salinger took a class
in short story writing
at Columbia University
under Whit Burnett,
founder-editor of the
Story Magazine.
During W.W.II he was
drafted into the infantry
and was involved in
the invasion of Normandy.
Salinger's comrades
considered him brave,
a genuine hero.
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During the first months in Europe
Salinger managed to write stories
and in Paris meet Ernest Hemingway.
He was also involved in one
of the bloodiest episodes of
the war in Hürtgenwald, a useless
battle, where he witnessed the
horrors of war. Salinger's early
short stories appeared in such
magazines as Story,
where his first story was published
in 1940, Saturday Evening
Post and Esquire,
and then in the New Yorker,
which published almost all of
his later texts.
In
1948 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'
appeared, which introduced Seymour
Glass, who commits suicide.
It was the earliest reference
to the Glass family, whose stories
would go on to form the main
corpus of his writing. The 'Glass
cycle' continued in the collections
Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise
High The Roof Beam, Carpenters(1963)
and Seymour an Introduction
(1963). Twenty stories published
in Collier's, Saturday Evening
Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping,
Cosmopolitan, and the
New Yorker between 1941
and 1948 appeared in a pirated
edition in 1974, The Complete
Uncompleted Stories of J.D.Salinger
(2 vols.). Many of them reflect
Salinger's own service in the
army. Later Salinger adopted
Hindu-Buddhist influences. He
became an ardent devotee of
The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna,
a study of Hindu mysticism,
which was translated into English
by Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph
Campbell.
Salinger's
first novel, The
Catcher in the Rye,
became immediately a Book-of-the-Month
Club selection and won huge
international acclaim. It sells
still some 250 000 copies annually.
Salinger did not do much to
help publicity, and asked that
his photograph should not be
used in connection with the
book. Later he has turned down
requests for movie adaptations
of the book. |
