A collection of reactions to the death of J. D. Salinger from around the internet - and one wonders what hidden treasures from his pen may be released in the coming years. I want to point out that even The Onion, which is mentioned below, had something to say about Salinger's death: Bunch of Phonies Mourn JD Salinger.
We begin with the article by Charles McGrath from the New York Times, perhaps the longest tribute I have so far seen.
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91 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’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.
With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.
The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell tens of thousands of copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who assassinated John Lennon in 1980, even said that the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.”
Many critics were even more admiring of “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape later writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it), and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — in favor of an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”
Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”
As a young man, Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of attention. He bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye” and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his agent to burn any fan mail.
In 1953, Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”
Read the whole article.
J. D. Salinger, reclusive author whose Catcher in the Rye caught the mood of a generation, is dead ...A collection of articles and Salinger stories from Slate.
Charles McGrath ... The New York Times
AP ...
Stephen Miller ...
Elaine Woo ...
London Times ...
Bart Barnes ...
FT ...
Telegraph ...
Mark Krupnick ...
Richard Lacayo ...
Tom Leonard ...
Martin Levin ...
Rick Moody ...
Richard Lea ...
Malcolm Jones ...
Morgan Meis ...
Chris Wilson ...
Robert Fulford ...
Ian Shapira ...
Michael Ruse ...
Christopher Reynolds ...
David Usborne ...
Joe Gross ...
Stephen King ...
John Walsh ...
Henry Allen ...
Mark Feeney ...
Ron Rosenbaum (1997) ...
John Timpane ...
Alex Beam ...
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Check out all of Saliger's stories at The New Yorker: find links to all of them here.J.D. Salinger, RIPStories on the late, great writer from the Slate archives.
Posted Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010, at 2:32 PM ETReclusive author J.D. Salinger died Thursday of natural causes at the age of 91. His novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, was a blockbuster success—it has sold more than 65 million copies. Over the years, Slate has published numerous articles on J.D. Salinger and his work. You can find links to these below.
"What a Phony: I read the banned Catcher in the Rye 'sequel' so you don't have to," by Juliet Lapidos. Posted July 15, 2009.
"Save the Salinger Archives! Even if we have to save them from Salinger himself," by Ron Rosenbaum. Posted Friday, June 5, 2009."Salinger on Trial," by Judith Shulevitz. Posted Thursday, Sept. 21, 2000.
"Hapworth 16, 1924: A Chatterbox Investigation," by Timothy Noah. Posted Monday, Sept. 11, 2000.
"J.D. Salinger, Failed Recluse," by Alex Beam. Posted Tuesday, June 29, 1999.
"I Was a Teen-Ager for the New York Times: Onetime Salinger paramour Joyce Maynard sells herself, piece by piece," by Alex Beam. Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 1998.
Another tribute round-up from The Guardian UK:
JD Salinger: A tribute roundup
From favourite quotes to speculation over the secret stash of unpublished works, the blogosphere is awash with JD Salinger tributes and anecdotes
Phonies and fans ... JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Photograph: Amy Sancetta/AP
Outpourings of prose from what the New York Times is calling Salingerologists greeted the death of the world's most famous literary recluse, JD Salinger, yesterday.
Tributes are everywhere, from Stephen King (not "a huge Salinger fan, but I'm sorry to hear of his passing – the way you'd feel if you heard an eccentric, short-tempered, but often fascinating uncle had passed away"), to Neil Gaiman ("I loved the short stories, liked Catcher, admired his isolation and the way he stopped") and my personal favourite, John Hodgman: "I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive". Not really sure what to make of Bret Easton Ellis though: "Yeah!! Thank God he's finally dead. I've been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!"
A fan remembers meeting Salinger in his 20s: "'You'd better come inside,' Salinger said. Krawczyk came in, and they went to the kitchen. As he remembers it, Krawczyk was not offered a seat or a cup of coffee … Then Krawczyk asked about The Catcher in the Rye. 'Did you think it would be such a popular book?' he asked. 'It's been a nightmare,' Krawczyk recalls Salinger answering. The writer did not elaborate."
Publisher Roger Lathbury, who corresponded with Salinger over the possible publication of Hapworth 16, 1924 in 1988 – it went sour after the press got wind of the plans – reveals, for the first time, details of his meeting with the author. "He was waiting patiently. I shook hands with him and apologized for being late and explained about the briefcase. He said, 'I was afraid of that.' He was trying to make me feel at ease but he was probably nervous, too.' They ordered. Salinger 'recommended the Parmesan soup, or a soup with Parmesan flavouring. I said, 'I am a vegetarian' and he said, 'I am largely a vegetarian.' I didn't know what that meant – sort of like saying, 'I am a little bit pregnant.'"
Collections of favourite Salinger quotes are springing up all over the place – "It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road", someone suggests here – and here GalleyCat has collected some old Salinger reviews (including Updike on Franny and Zooey: "His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its morbidity, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life").
The question everyone's really asking, though, is what will happen to the writing. Salinger is said to have a "secret cache" of about 15 unpublished novels, but yesterday his literary agent declined to comment on whether they exist or are likely to be published, and his publisher said there were "no plans" for any new books.
My own favourite tribute comes from the always-excellent Onion. "Bunch of Phonies Mourn JD Salinger," it reports. "In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author JD Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud … 'There will never be another voice like his.' Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything."
Salinger himself, I think, might have approved of that one. It's pretty certain he'd have been unimpressed by all the chatter, – Holden Caulfield perhaps said it best: "Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."
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