Biography of J. D. Salinger, American Writer

Banned in our high school library which made us all want to read it even more. I graduated in 1964 and believe it was several years before it was un-banned, this was Puritanical Connecticut after all!

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on July 16, 1951, the novel "Catcher in Rye" by WWII Army veteran, author J. D. Salinger was published by Little Brown and Company.

I read "Catcher in Rye" as an older teenager and it's imagery captured my imagination. Dark and foreboding yet enchanting.

Living with J. D. Salinger, Author of The Catcher in the Rye (2000)
Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an American author known for writing with candor about her life, as well as for her works of fiction and hundreds of essays and newspaper columns, often about parenting and family...
The 1998 publication of her memoir, At Home in the World, made her the object of intense criticism among some members of the literary world for having revealed the story of the relationship she had with author J. D. Salinger when he was 53 and she was 18. Maynard is the mother of actor Wilson Bethel.
Maynard was born in Durham, New Hampshire, the daughter of Fredelle (née Bruser), a journalist, writer, and teacher, and Max Maynard, a painter and professor of English.[1] Her father was born in India, to English missionary parents, and later moved to Canada; her mother was Jewish (she was born in Saskatchewan, to immigrants from Russia).[2][3][4] Maynard attended the Oyster River School District and Phillips Exeter Academy. She won early recognition for her writing from The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, winning student writing prizes in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, and 1971. While in her teens, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine. She entered Yale University in 1971 and sent a collection of her writings to the editors of The New York Times Magazine. They asked her to write an article for them, which was published as "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" at the Wayback Machine (archived December 14, 2000) in the magazine's April 23, 1972 issue. The article prompted a letter from J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEMl3mCYtIc

Image:
1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
2. Sergeant J.D. Salinger was known as 'Jerry' to the men in his company
3. J. D. Salinger's Band of Brother
4. Salinger married a French-German woman named Sylvia Welter while stationed in Germany. The marriage ended after he discovered she disliked Jews.

Background from {[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jd-salinger-life-catcher-in-rye-books-anniversary-franny-zooey-raise-high-roof-beam-john-lennon-a8699026.html]}
If he were still alive, JD Salinger, the world’s most famous literary hermit, would surely turn his back on any brouhaha surrounding his centenary in 2019.
The Manhattan-born author notoriously went into suburban seclusion in the town of Cornish, New Hampshire, soon after the publication of his best-selling 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Throughout the following years he would utter the plea “why can’t my life be my own?”. He also complained bitterly to close friends about the “damn people” who sent him invitations to social events.
“My father hated birthdays, holidays, and pretty much any planned or culturally mandated celebrations, and he’d certainly hate this centennial,” Matt Salinger, the 58-year-old actor who appeared in Revenge of the Nerds and Captain America, told the Associated Press recently. He was commenting after the announcement that the New York Public Library will open a major exhibition in October featuring “manuscripts, letters, books and artefacts from Salinger’s archive”. Little, Brown Book Group are also staging events across America next year to mark the anniversary of the author’s birth on 1 January 1919.
When Salinger died on 27 January 2010, aged 91, he was described as “a recluse” in virtually every report. Although he spent much of his adult life trying to avoid interviews, the term is not an accurate description the famous author. Jerome David Salinger, who went by the name Jerry, played up to a loner image. He may have described himself to a friend as “a perennial sad sack”, but he was an active socialite as a youngster (frequenting the glitzy Stork Club in New York) and even toyed with the idea of becoming an actor.
In 1941, after leaving a creative writing course at Columbia University, he worked for three weeks as the entertainment director of the cruise liner MS Kungsholm. In that role, Salinger was responsible for helping to make sure the 1,500 passengers sailing round the West Indies were having fun. He organised games of deck tennis and danced with unattached ladies who were on board. His career in showbusiness was brought to an end that year when the Kungsholm was requisitioned by the US government for use in the war effort. When Betty Eppes, a reporter for The Baton Rouge Advocate, asked him what he had been like as the ship’s jolly entertainer, Salinger sidestepped the question.
In the spring of 1942, Salinger was drafted into the US army. The Second World War was a defining experience and the horrors he witnessed left him with mental scars for life. “I have survived a lot,” he said, although he never talked publicly about what he had seen at a concentration camp. Salinger served as an infantry man and in counter-intelligence and participated in the assault on Utah Beach as part of the D-day landings. He was present during the brutal and bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest in late 1944. “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” he told his daughter Margaret.
According to Kenneth Slawenski, one of Salinger’s biographers, the traumatised young soldier was sent to hospital at the end of the war, for what would now probably be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. While undergoing treatment, he met a half-German, half-French woman called Sylvia Welter and they were married within weeks. The union lasted just eight months and ended abruptly when he discovered she had been a Gestapo informant during the war. He annulled the marriage and cut off all contact.
During those army days, Salinger had worked away at writing short stories and his resolve to be a writer had been strengthened by meeting Ernest Hemingway, who was in Europe reporting on the war. After returning to America, Salinger continued to work on his novel about a character called Holden Caulfield. The character first appeared in the short story “I’m Crazy”, which was published in Collier’s magazine in 1945. The Catcher in the Rye was first published on 16 July 1951 and has since sold more than 70 million copies.
The celebrated opening of the novel – “If you really want to know 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.” – enraptured readers and helped make the book an instant success. Salinger did not like the fame that came with a hit book. The same man who went to London in 1951 and drank cocktails at the home of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh disliked the idea that he was now public property. Over the next two years, he decided that his only chance to continue a life dedicated to writing was to eschew celebrity life and New York’s literary cliques. “Contact with the public hinders my work,“ he said. In 1953, on his birthday, he left the city to live in a secluded 90-acre rural compound in Cornish.

Who said it?
Although the Salinger myth is of the oddball introvert, his early life in the tiny rural town was filled with socialising, especially with young women. Some of his biographers believe this fondness for young girls started with his love for 16-year-old Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill. While Salinger was away on war duty, O’Neill became the fourth wife of the 54-year-old film star Charlie Chaplin. Salinger was devastated and wrote her a stinging letter of rebuke, in which he reportedly drew a cartoon of Chaplin holding his penis as he chased after Oona.
His 1950 short story “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” was inspired by Jean Miller, the young girl who was 14 when they first met. She later became his lover. “Jerry Salinger listened like you were the most important person in the world,” Miller told his 2013 biographers David Shields and Shane Salerno. “I felt very free with him.”
His 1950 short story “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor” was inspired by Jean Miller, the young girl who was 14 when they first met. She later became his lover. “Jerry Salinger listened like you were the most important person in the world,” Miller told his 2013 biographers David Shields and Shane Salerno. “I felt very free with him.”
In his first year in Cornish, the 34-year-old Salinger spent a lot of time hanging around with local teenagers. He bought them food and drinks at a soda bar called Nap’s Lunch and would take them to ball games in his old army Jeep. He often invited them to his house to listen to music (he was a fan of Billie Holiday and showband tunes) where they would drink coke and eat crisps. He would get them to join in games that involved a Ouija board he nicknamed ”Pierce“.
His favourite teenager was 16-year-old blonde Shirlie Blaney. “He seemed to love having us around ... he was just like one of the gang,” she later told Shields and Salerno. They claimed the writer was having a relationship with the Vermont high school student, which would certainly explain why he broke his rule about giving interviews and allowed her to quiz him in 1953 for her school magazine. In the article, she described the half-Jewish son of a cheese salesman as a “tall and foreign-looking man”. Blaney quoted Salinger as saying he was considering moving to London to make a movie. Her feature appeared in the local The Claremont Daily Eagle and was then picked up for syndication across America. Salinger was furious and apparently never spoke to her again.
According to another biographer, Paul Alexander, he had a standard pick-up line in these years. “I’m JD Salinger and I wrote The Catcher in the Rye,” he would tell women. The line seemingly worked with a teenager called Claire Douglas, whom he met at a party in New York in 1954, shortly after he stopped seeing Blaney. She fell in love with the author and was persuaded to drop out of school and live with him. When Salinger wed London-born Douglas in February 1955, there was no reference to his first marriage in the documentation. They stayed married for 12 years, during which time they had two children, Margaret and Matthew. Margaret was born in 1955, the year her father’s stories Franny and novella Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters were published in The New Yorker.
Life as the daughter of the famous author was bizarre – not least because he would lecture her at length on the correct way to chew food. Margaret’s memoir from 2000, Dream Catcher, describes growing up in an atmosphere of emotional coldness. Although Salinger had resented being sent away during his childhood – he particularly detested his time at the Valley Forge Military Academy – he was unsympathetic when his daughter rang from her boarding school to plead for help when she was ill and lonely. Salinger cut her short and instead sent her a subscription to The Christian Science Journal.
Her book also details some of his weirder traits, including his belief in the therapeutic powers of his energy-capturing orgone box, his obsession with homeopathy and a fad he went through of drinking his own urine. Her brother, five years her junior, dismissed his “troubled” sister’s propensity to tell “Gothic tales of our supposed childhood”.
Margaret’s book was published two years after a tell-all memoir by Salinger’s former lover Joyce Maynard, who was 18 when she left college to live with the 53-year-old writer in 1972. After eight months, she was unceremoniously dumped. “He put two $50 bills in my hand and instructed me to clear my things out of his house and disappear,” she recalled. Maynard, who is now 65, said in an interview in September 2018 that she had been vilified for her revelations. She said she hoped the #MeToo movement would allow her story to be seen in a different light. Among the odd revelations in Maynard’s book At Home in the World is that Salinger had a rigid diet that involved eating frozen peas for breakfast.
Two people who could have shed real light on his character – his sister Doris, a fashion buyer at Bloomingdale’s, and his long-term friend, the writer SJ Perelman – never talked publicly about Salinger. His second wife Claire also declined to write a book about her life with Salinger and his interest in strange philosophies, including one that suggested that women were impure. “We did not make love very often. The body was evil,” his wife Claire said.
His obsessions took a toll on Claire, who divorced him in 1967. Lady Douglas of Kirtleside, a relative from the UK, later revealed she had been concerned about her niece’s welfare with Salinger. “They were living in something like a hut at one stage with no running water, and Claire had to go about carrying buckets of water,” Lady Douglas told The Scotsman in 2010, speaking after Salinger’s death from natural causes. “She got fed up with it all and had several miscarriages. She ended up becoming a sort of women’s libber, burning bras across America. After that, we lost touch.”
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A better image of Salinger comes through the 50 letters and four postcards he sent to Londoner Donald Hartog from 1986 to 2002. Salinger met Hartog in 1937, when they were both 18 and studying German in Vienna, and they remained lifelong friends. Salinger wrote to his friend describing his life in more everyday terms.
There were letters about cultivating his vegetable garden, about his appreciation of England’s World Cup team and in praise of tennis player Tim Henman. Salinger also told Hartog he wanted to visit Whipsnade Zoo, that he enjoyed the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs and that he loved flame-grilled Burger King whoppers. He also liked to relax by watching Marx Brothers and Alfred Hitchcock films and doing crossword puzzles. Belying his image as a misanthrope, he also told his old friend about an “oddly pleasing” trip he had taken to Niagara Falls, and how his fellow tourists were “more often than not interesting and nice company”.
Salinger never spoke publicly about politics, but in this correspondence, he offered his private opinions of legislators. He described US politicians in general as “an odious bunch” and talked approvingly of Mikhail Gorbachev’s election as president of the Soviet Union. He referred to President Ronald Reagan and George Bush in 1988 as ”the outgoing dummy and the incoming dummy”.
The year Bush was elected, 65-year-old Salinger (who described his appearance at the time as “white-haired and creasy”) married Colleen O’Neill, a 25-year-old nurse who was the director of the annual Cornish town fair. They remained together for the final 22 years of his life, as he grew older, more infirm and very deaf. Salinger refused to wear a hearing aid and at the Railway Station restaurant where he ate regularly. A waitress recalled that she used to have to write down instructions on a dry-wipe board he carried with him.
Salinger’s widow still lives in Cornish and in 2016 bought the town’s General Store for $288,000. “My interest is to get this store back up and running,” she told the local Cornish Valley News. “This will be a place for people to run into each other, have a coffee and chat.”
O’Neill was protective of her husband’s privacy, particularly when he was pestered by admiring fans or pursued by reporters trying to trap him into interviews. He admitted that he wasn’t even able to answer the telephone “without unconsciously gritting my teeth”.
The paranoia about unwanted visitors can only have increased after the events of 1980. The Catcher in the Rye had become the bible of alienation for a generation of disaffected teenagers and in December 1980 its vast popular appeal was shown to bring its own problems. Mark David Chapman was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he was arrested for killing John Lennon and he told police that “this extraordinary book” would help people to understand why he had shot the former Beatle. He cited the novel as “his statement”.
The Catcher in the Rye was also found in John Hinckley’s hotel room after he was arrested for attempting to assassinate President Reagan. None of the subsequent debate about the novel made Salinger feel any more disposed to deal with what he called the public’s “intrusive” interest in his life.
The image of him as the lonely writer was cemented in 1988 by a snatched photograph in which Salinger looks haunted and alarmed. The picture inspired Don DeLillo to write Mao II, in which the protagonist Bill Gray is a famous author-recluse who has spent years endlessly rewriting the same book. “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear,” DeLillo wrote.
The Salinger “industry”, something he abhorred, has cranked up in earnest since 2010. A 2013 headline in The Atlantic read “On the Trail of JD Salinger’s Testicle”, above an article reporting on the news that two women had “independently confirmed” Shields and Salerno’s claim that Salinger only had one testicle. They conjectured that fears over talk of his sole ball was one of the reasons he became a recluse.
Salinger is still a cultural reference point. In the brilliant animated television show BoJack Horseman, Salinger’s character is voiced by Alan Arkin. Perhaps Salinger, who adored the TV comedy series I Love Lucy, would appreciate the satire of his fictional cartoon-self devising a game show called “Hollywood Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let’s Find Out”.

A federal court once banned the late Ian Hamilton’s biography of Salinger, which prompted him to write In Search of JD Salinger, a book about his thwarted attempt to write Salinger’s life story. Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, reviewing the book for The New York Times in 1988, brought a writer’s perspective to the subject. “According to a neighbour, JD Salinger is said to rise at 5 or 6am in his home in Cornish, NH, and then walk ‘down the hill to his studio, a tiny concrete shelter with a translucent plastic roof,’ and spend 15 or 16 hours at his typewriter. Later he may watch one of his vast collection of 1940’s movies. Hardly the stuff of drama.”
His last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924”, came out in 1965. In his will, Salinger suggested that some of his unpublished works could be out by 2020. It has been reported that Salinger left five new Glass family stories and a novella based on his relationship with his first wife, Sylvia, in the form of a counter-intelligence officer’s diary entries during the war. He also left a story-filled “manual” about the Vedanta religious philosophy; and fresh tales about Holden Caulfield. There has also been talk of long novels produced during those marathon stints in his bunker.
It is unlikely anything new will match the exuberance of The Catcher in the Rye, which still sells a quarter of a million copies a year. Perhaps we will never find out how good his writing from those lonely years was or whether Gore Vidal was right to suggest that Salinger’s enigmatic exile lent his work a seriousness it didn’t deserve.
Salinger’s children and widow have not confirmed any new books. Instead, his son recently urged people to focus on work already in the public domain. “I would love for more people to read his last two books, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, for I hear his voice the clearest in these,“ his son Matt said recently. ”He loved writing and he loved his readers, and I hope his readers will be glad for an excuse to remember him in this way.”
In one of his rare interviews, which Salinger volunteered to The New York Times in 1974, he talked about the importance of his books, rather than his image as a loner. “I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man,” he said. “But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work."

Background from {[https://www.americanheritage.com/catcher-rye-d-day]}
“Catcher in the Rye” on D-Day
J.D. Salinger carried a draft of his later-to-be-famous novel with him when he landed on the beach at Normandy.

I don't think I could stand it if I had to go to war. It wouldn't be so bad if they'd just take you out and shoot you, but you have to stay in the army so goddamn long.
—The Catcher in the Rye

June 6, 1944 — Four thousand landing craft bob just off the beaches of Normandy. At dawn, soldiers pour into the shallow surf. Each carries up to 100 pounds of equipment. M-1 rifle. Ten-pocket ammo belt, pistol, small shovel, pick, first aid pouch, canteen, gas mask. . . Some soldiers carry books, but one carries his own book, draft chapters of a novel that will soon speak to a generation.
If you really want to know the truth about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like. . .
Soldiers in the Fourth Infantry Division called Sergeant Salinger “Jerry.” Tall, lean, and handsome, with a Park Avenue upbringing, he seemed too delicate for war. Many in the invasion force assembling in England heard him typing, typing away in the barracks, but he rarely talked about writing. With his fingernails tobacco stained, his nails bitten to the quick, Jerry seemed just a regular guy, kinder than most sergeants, but ready to fight.

In the week before the D-Day, Salinger’s division was kept on a troopship in Devon, waiting. Rumors flew. Tomorrow would be the day. No, the next day. The next. . . Rain was relentless. Then on the night of June 5, soldiers were given a steak dinner and told to sleep. Few did. In the early morning darkness, the armada carrying 156,000 men cut loose from the English coast and streamed into the darkness toward France.
A dozen miles from the beaches of Normandy, engines stopped. Landing craft fell silent. Troops could hear artillery booming. Men pitched in the waves, some vomiting, others praying. No one knows what Sergeant Salinger was thinking. He rarely spoke of it later.

One of Salinger's first articles was "Death of a Dogface." He was furious when Saturday Evening Post published it with a humorous cartoon and the title "The Soft-Boiled Sergeant."
I’m not going to tell you my whole damn autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. . .
Salinger was supposed to be in the first wave, but plans changed. He landed in second wave ten minutes later. The change probably saved his life. Waves soon sent his craft a mile south of its destination. Salinger and Holden landed in a calm sector of Utah Beach and were soon moving inland. But the battle had just begun.
Back in New York, Salinger had drifted after high school. Living in his parents’ Park Avenue apartment, he took writing classes at Columbia and pinned his hopes on The New Yorker. Other magazines — Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post — published his work, but The New Yorker rejected story after story. Then in October 1941, the magazine accepted “Slight Rebellion off Madison.”
The story, Salinger said, was “a sad little comedy about a prep school boy on Christmas vacation.” Written in third person, it sketches a lost kid named Holden, home from vacation, taking his old girlfriend Sally Hayes out for a drink. The story was to be published in December but after Pearl Harbor, editors considered it too frivolous for a nation at war. Publication was postponed. Salinger was devastated. Later, in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, he wrote, “I think I’ll hate 1942 till I die, just on general principles.”
Months later, after The New Yorker rejected more stories, Salinger was drafted. He took his Holden stories with him overseas where he hoped to craft them into a novel. But the novel would have to wait.
Between D-Day and the end of the war, Sergeant Salinger carried Holden through some of the fiercest fighting of World War II. Pushing the Germans back, clearing villages in hand-to-hand combat, marching past dead bodies, Salinger held tightly to his novel and to his sanity.
“You never really get the smell of burned flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” he told his daughter.

On August 25, 1944, Salinger marched onto the Champs-Élysées with troops liberating Paris. Hearing that Hemingway was in the joyous city, he hopped in a Jeep and sped to the Hotel Ritz. There he drank with the fabled author and showed him his most recent story in The Saturday Evening Post. Then the Fourth Infantry marched out.

Salinger then fought in the Battle of the Bulge, crossed into Germany, into more carnage, finally helping to liberate the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Two months after the war ended, Sergeant Jerome David Salinger, his hands trembling, face twitching, checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in Nuremberg. Suffering from battle fatigue, he spent two months outlasting the “madman stuff.” Finally, embittered, scarred, but physically unscathed, he came home.

Catcher in the Rye was partially serialized in 1945-6 and finally published as a book in 1951.
In December 1945, Collier’s published “I’m Crazy,” and the world met Holden Caulfield. The following December, The New Yorker finally published “Slight Rebellion off Madison.” Within two years, Salinger stories were appearing regularly in the magazine. And in July 1951, the chapters that had come in a haversack across Utah Beach, into Paris, and through the fiercest fighting of the war burst onto the literary world.
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all… I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye.

That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles HaydenMSgt James Clark-Rosa SMSgt Tom Burns 1SG Dan Capri MGySgt (Join to see) SFC Ralph E Kelley

I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye many times, SGT (Join to see). While in college, I went to the library and made copies of all his short stories and put them in a scrapbook which I have to this day. Two of those short stories were ultimately the basis of the famous novel.
“In November 1941 he sold the story ‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’, which featured Holden Caulfield, to The New Yorker, but it wasn't published until December 21, 1946, due to World War II. The story ‘I'm Crazy’, which was published in the December 22, 1945 issue of Collier's, contained material that was later used in The Catcher in the Rye.”
Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen PO1 H Gene Lawrence LTC David Brown SPC Douglas Bolton PVT Mark Zehner CSM Charles Hayden SGT Mark Anderson Lt Col Charlie Brown