J.D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger was an American writer, born Jerome David Salinger in New York City in 1919, the son of a prosperous importer. He attended several schools, including a military academy that informed his later fiction, and began publishing short stories in magazines in his early twenties. His writing was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, where he saw heavy combat, experiences that marked him deeply.

Salinger achieved enormous fame with his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. Narrated by the alienated teenager Holden Caulfield, the book captured postwar adolescent disillusionment with such force that it became a defining voice for generations of young readers and a perennial fixture, and frequent target of censorship, in American schools.

He also published acclaimed short fiction, much of it centered on the gifted and troubled Glass family, collected in works such as Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey. His spare, dialogue-driven style and his preoccupation with innocence, authenticity, and spiritual longing influenced countless writers.

Increasingly uncomfortable with fame, Salinger withdrew from public life and stopped publishing, retreating to a secluded home in New Hampshire where he reportedly continued to write for himself. He died there in 2010 at the age of ninety-one, his reclusiveness having become as legendary as the book that made him famous.