As he died at 91 just two days ago I decided to pay tribute by posting an entry here.
Text below is copied from: http://www.time.com
Salinger's only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in 1951 and gradually achieved a status that made him cringe. For decades the book was a universal rite of passage for adolescents, the manifesto of disenchanted youth. (Sometimes lethally disenchanted: After he killed John Lennon in 1980, Mark David Chapman said he had done it "to promote the reading" of Salinger's book. Roughly a year later, when he headed out to shoot President Ronald Reagan, John Hinckley Jr. left behind a copy of the book in his hotel room.) But what matters is that even for the millions of people who weren't crazy, Holden Caulfield, Salinger's petulant, yearning (and arguably manic-depressive) young hero was the original angry young man. That he was also a sensitive soul in a cynic's armor only made him more irresistible. James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway had invented disaffected young men too. But Salinger created Caulfield at the very moment that American teenage culture was being born. A whole generation of rebellious youths discharged themselves into one particular rebellious youth.
Photo and Biographical Info courtesy of Wikipedia.
Salinger in 1950 | |
Born | Jerome David Salinger January 1, 1919 Manhattan, New York |
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Died | January 27, 2010 (aged 91)[1] Cornish, New Hampshire, United States[1] |
Occupation | Writer |
Writing period | 1940–1965 |
Notablework(s) | The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Seymour: An Introduction (1963) |
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Did you like the book? I read it as an adult and thought it was lame. But it was at least 35 years after it was published.
ReplyDeleteI think so as it is a title and author I have never forgotten! Though it was an awful long time ago. As I mentioned it did have rather a cult following amongst classmates at the time. Maybe I read it because everyone else was?
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