J.D. Salinger

It's not hard to see why the idea of J.D. Salinger as an asocial genius appeals. Living in a world of tabloid television and gossip Web sites, it is comforting to think of a higher intellect who has rejected it all. Verlyn Klinkenborg's New York Times editorial celebrated this romantic ideal: "There was a purity in Mr. Salinger's separation from the world, whatever its motives, whatever his character. His half-century of solitude and silence was a creative act in itself, requiring extraordinary force of will." Insisting on Salinger's reclusiveness has given us an antihero nearly as influential as Salinger's greatest creation, Holden Caulfield.

But I think there is another, more insidious reason that the literary establishment is so invested in the fictional, reclusive Salinger. It is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger's personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths about one of America's most revered authors. Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger's daughter Margaret were vilified for violating the great man's privacy when they wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might bring to readings of Salinger's work (not to mention the women's right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books as exploitative, attention-seeking stunts. When Maynard decided to sell some of the letters Salinger had written her -- letters that confirmed her story of their affair -- the response was even more bitter. A typical reaction was that of author Cynthia Ozick, who wrote that Maynard "has never been a real artist and has no real substance and has attached herself to the real artists in order to suck out his celebrity." This sort of backlash is not exclusive to Salinger -- when Pablo Picasso's former wives and lovers began to expose him as a physically and emotionally abusive man, they were subject to similar criticisms.

As feminists have long known, the personal is political, and women who tell unpleasant truths rarely find a receptive audience. Anyone who got into an argument about Roman Polanski this past year knows how desperately fans can cling to their icons, despite clear evidence of wrongdoing. Acknowledging the experiences of Margaret Salinger or Joyce Maynard would mean deviating from the Salinger myth. To shut such conversations down, we're told to be rational and to "separate the art from the artist." But those insisting on this separation aren't rejecting biographical details as part of how we understand works of art, they are merely insisting we use their narrative, in order to reach their conclusions.

Continuing to believe in the mythically reclusive Salinger and disallowing the presence of the women in his life doesn't do anyone any good. We need to be able to appreciate art in all of its complicated contexts. Artists -- both men and women -- have personal lives, and they are often messy. Picasso painted compelling portraits of women he had abused. Roman Polanski assaulted a young woman and made taut, thoughtful films. J.D. Salinger went to church suppers and hooked up with actresses. I hope that in the wake of J.D. Salinger's death, his real story can now be told. Let's leave the fiction on the shelf.

Mikki Halpin is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is currently at work on a book about fandom. 

Bin Laden sought seclusion in the mountains of Afghanistan following the disastrous attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.  Salinger sought seclusion in the mountains of New Hampshire following the disastrous reviews of the film version of his story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut."  The two men were never seen together, and mysteriously canceled a scheduled appearance on "The Hollywood Squares" when they learned that Wally Cox would not be a member of the show's nine-celebrity "tic-tac-toe" box.

Wally Cox and Joyce Maynard:  No connection, but the lack of any parallels is rather eerie.

Both Salinger and bin Laden became increasingly eccentric in their later years, with Salinger drinking his own urine according to his lover Joyce Maynard, a woman half Salinger's age who, like him, scored an early literary success.  Her world-weary adolescent memoir "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" caught the attention of Salinger, who sent her a letter complimenting her style "because you obviously copied it from mine."

Salinger was highly opinionated about the jacket design of his book. Being notoriously uncomfortable with fame, he asked to have his image taken off the dust jacket, and he objected to James Avati's art for the paperback (he didn't want any art on it at all). When Salinger switched to Bantam Press, the book was published with just a red cover, title and author name. "The Catcher in the Rye" has since appeared in many editions, in many countries, and we've assembled some of the most memorable jackets here (along with one recent homage on the cover of Frank Portman's novel, "King Dork").

Click here to view the slide show.

Despite his elusiveness, Salinger succeeded at locating himself at the exact intersection of several kinds of American ambivalence. He was famous for not wanting to be famous, sought after primarily because he did not want to be found. His success made his seclusion possible; his seclusion made the hordes of would-be biographers and interviewers and memoir-writing past associates even more frantic to expose him to the public eye. He created profoundly alienated characters with whom millions of readers have identified.

The work itself seemed to eat its own tail. Salinger, who lived to the ripe old age of 91, wrote about young people who could hardly bear the breath of the world on their exquisitely sensitive skins. His most famous creation, Holden Caulfield, railed against the hypocrisies of adults -- "phonies," each and every one. Seymour Glass, in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," kills himself after an encounter with a little girl on a beach presses home the corrupt venality of his wife and the rest of the adult world. How does any artist so preoccupied with the purity of childhood cope with growing up?

We may never know -- there's no guarantee that Salinger's heirs will find anything of merit to publish in the papers he leaves behind, and, more to the point, Salinger gave no signs that he ever did really grow up. He's the quintessential mid-20th-century American author, and "The Catcher in the Rye" was the archetypal novel of the 1950s, precisely because of its callowness. By comparison, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," its 19th-century counterpart, seems fantastically worldly.

In "Catcher," every motif of America's famously adolescent national character burns bright: the moral absolutism, the inchoate chafing at any manifestation of authority, the romanticizing of innocence and childhood, a certain prudishness, and the conviction of personal exceptionalism. All of these traits are problematic, obviously; you can see the seeds of countless political mistakes and miscalculations in Holden's self-righteousness and rigidity, his ability to feel persecuted in the lap of privilege.

Yet for all these insufferable qualities, Holden spoke in an authentic American voice: frank, funny and with an infectious vernacular swagger. Salinger admired Hemingway, but he was in large part responsible for liberating American fiction from the austere, humorless sobriety of the Hemingway cult. No contemporary, first-person narrator would ever be the same after "Catcher" -- and thank God for that. Writers ranging from Pauline Kael to Michael Chabon have roamed freely across the frontier that Salinger opened up.

Above all, Holden is a believable teenager, a character who has shown young readers throughout the world that they can find their gripes, their restlessness, their idealism, and their lives breathing in the pages of a book. Though Salinger connoisseurs often swear to the superiority of the Glass Family stories, this is rightly regarded as the author's greatest gift to literature. Holden never grew up, and perhaps his creator never accomplished that either, but most of his readers did. Thanks to "The Catcher in the Rye," they did it with the certainty that a battered paperback tucked in the back pocket of your jeans is an indispensable ally for anyone heading out into the world.

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight -- and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing -- more than 60 million copies worldwide -- and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams -- to never grow up.

Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher" presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.

Novels from Evan Hunter's "The Blackboard Jungle" to Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep," movies from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "The Breakfast Club," and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of "The Graduate," was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator.

The cult of "Catcher" turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book holds many answers."

By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook.

Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of "Catcher," but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever.

The collection "Nine Stories" features the classic "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel "Franny and Zooey," like "Catcher," is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub.

"Catcher," narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for failing four classes and for general apathy.

He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as just so much phoniness.

"I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question."

"The Catcher in the Rye" became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder.

"I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for "20th Century Authors."

"It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach," he added.

Salinger also wrote the novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour -- An Introduction," both featuring the neurotic, fictional Glass family which appeared in much of his work.

His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker in 1965. By then he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented.

In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book -- prompting a (negative) New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.

"I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it."

Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived for years on Park Avenue.

Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published his first fiction, "The Young Folks," in Story magazine.

He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend.

Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E. Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville.

Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post. Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New Yorker, where excerpts from "Catcher" were published.

The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted."

But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T. Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden.

"Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind - as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention."

The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. (Salinger was also briefly married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her).

Meanwhile, he was refusing interviews, instructing his agent to forward no fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."

"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."

Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of "Catcher," with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein also were rejected.

Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and Salinger dropped the suit.

Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton, that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which came out in a revised edition in 1988.

In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's "60 Years Later," an unauthorized sequel to "Catcher" that imagined Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever.

Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In 1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir "At Home in the World," in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric eating habits, and described their problematic sex life.

Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

Ms. Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."

Many of the controversial novels of the last century were publicly condemned because it was believed they would lead to a decay in public morals. These criticisms were often patronizing ("Won't somebody please think of the children?"), expressing the belief that less educated members of society were likely to imitate anything and everything they read. The prosecutor in the 1960 British obscenity trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" asked jurors if it was the kind of book they wanted their wife or servants to read.

As ludicrous as that may sound today, obviously people are influenced by what they see and read, and authors have little control over how people will react to the ideas in their books. Although Isaac Asimov was a fierce critic of religion and New Age thinking, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo was heavily influenced by his "Foundation" series of novels. The novels depict a universe where a galactic empire has become decadent and ripe for collapse. The empire's ruling planet is a vast hive of people and the only natural environment is the garden surrounding the emperor's palace. Only the foresight of Hari Seldon and his secret society of scientists can preserve civilization's knowledge before it is lost in the dark ages. Seldon's followers convert their society into a religion, believing "it is the most potent device known with which to control men and worlds."

Although Asimov based his empire on ancient Rome, members of Aum Shinrikyo saw similarities between Asimov's empire and modern Japanese society. The cult's founder, Shoko Asahara, preached that civilization was coming to an end and only the faithful would survive. He gathered around him a team of scientists from diverse disciplines. David Kaplan and Andrew Marshall's "The Cult at the End of the World" outlines how the cult's chief scientist, Hideo Murai, saw Aum's mission to save humanity from the coming apocalypse as mirroring the Foundation's struggle:

"In an interview, Murai would state matter-of-factly that Aum was using the Foundation series as the blueprint for the cult's long term plans. He gave the impression of 'a graduate student who had read too many science fiction novels,' remembered one reporter. But it was real enough to the cult. Shoko Asahara, the blind and bearded guru from Japan, had become Hari Seldon; and Aum Shinrikyo was the Foundation."

Asahara directed his scientists to create a variety of chemical and biological weapons to fight their enemies. When the predicted apocalypse wasn't forthcoming, Asahara decided to take matters into his own hands. On March 20, 1995, some of his followers released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring more than 5,000.

An article in the Guardian, the British newspaper, speculated that "Foundation" may have also influenced Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. It related claims that "Foundation" had been translated into Arabic under the title "al-Qaeda" -- which means the base or foundation -- and that bin Laden might have identified with the idea of a small group of rebels fighting against a decadent evil empire. This speculation has not, however, been widely accepted. It isn't even clear that an Arabic version of the novel was ever published.

"Foundation" is not the only novel to have influenced terrorists. A copy of "The Turner Diaries" was found in Timothy McVeigh's car when he was arrested. The novel was written by a leader of the National Alliance and tells the story of a white supremacist group that overthrows the government and subsequently eradicates nonwhites as well as "race traitors." The narrator destroys FBI headquarters by detonating a truck loaded with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. McVeigh used a similar mechanism to destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

Several of McVeigh's friends testified he had given them copies of the book, encouraging them to read it. McVeigh had highlighted phrases in his copy of the book including: "the real value of all of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties," as well as one promising that politicians will not escape: "We can still find them and kill them." The novel ends with the narrator flying a bomb-laden plane into the Pentagon.

Another bomber with a fondness for reading was Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber was a big fan of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent," an ironic novel in which a university professor turned anarchist is recruited to blow up a scientific icon, London's Greenwich Observatory. A Washington Post article revealed that prior to Kaczynski's arrest, the FBI had suspected the novel's influence and contacted Conrad scholars to help them in constructing their profile.

Author Joe Haldeman has spoken about the unintended influence of a short story he published in the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy in 1974. In "To Howard Hughes: A Modest Proposal," a blackmailer forces world disarmament by developing his own nuclear bomb. Haldeman says the story contained "pretty detailed instructions for acquiring plutonium and constructing a subcritical nuclear device (information not that easy to find, pre-Internet, but nothing classified) ... [Someone] used the story as a template and wrote a blackmail letter to the mayor of Los Angeles, saying he had a van parked somewhere downtown with a nuclear bomb in it, and he'd blow it up in 24 hours if he didn't get a million dollars, delivered to such-and-such a park at noon. Evidently the details were accurate enough for them to respond with a suitcase full of money, and of course a park full of agents disguised as normal people. The miscreant turned out to be a 15-year-old science fiction fan."

Science fiction operates on a grander scale than other genres, often portraying world-changing events that can be attractive to people who want to change the world. Such was the case with Robert Heinlein's highly influential novel "Stranger in a Strange Land." Time magazine reported that Charles Manson used the novel as a blueprint for his infamous family and that it led to the murder of Sharon Tate and others. It was later revealed, however, that Manson had never read the novel.

Some of Manson's followers had indeed adopted ideas and terminology from the book into their rituals. "Stranger in a Strange Land" features a Martian with superpowers who comes to earth and starts a free love movement. The novel also influenced others to form their own polygamous societies, including a "neo-pagan" group known as the Church of All Worlds. The church's Web site explains how its founders were inspired by Heinlein's novel: "This book suggested a spiritual and social way of life and was a metaphor expressing the awakening social consciousness of the times." (The Church of All Worlds has not been linked to any murders.)

Films reach a much wider audience than novels and often the real public outcry about a book isn't raised until the film version is released. "A Clockwork Orange" was blamed for inspiring so many copycat crimes -- from homeless people beaten to death to a gang rape where the attackers sang "Singin' in the Rain" -- that director Stanley Kubrick had it withdrawn from cinemas in England. The book's author, Anthony Burgess, insisted that there was no definitive proof "that a work of art can stimulate antisocial behavior ... the notorious murderer Haig who killed and drank [his victims'] blood said he was inspired by the sacrament of the Eucharist. Does that mean we should ban the Bible?"

Burgess was later to change his mind after the 1993 murder near Liverpool, England, in which 2-year-old James Bulger was abducted and tortured to death by two 10-year-old boys. The horror film "Child's Play 3" was linked to the case, and Burgess wrote that he now accepted the arts could exert a negative influence, adding, "I begin to accept that as a novelist, I belong to the ranks of the menacing."

Criminals will sometimes blame a work of fiction for their crimes, hoping to shift responsibility. These claims are inevitably treated with considerable skepticism. But one book that has been linked to a number of serial killers is John Fowles' "The Collector." The 1963 novel tells the story of a butterfly collector who becomes so obsessed with a woman called Miranda that he kidnaps and imprisons her in his cellar. California serial killers Charles Ng and Leonard Lake named one of their schemes "Operation Miranda." Lake later committed suicide, but Ng was found guilty of the imprisonment, torture and murder of 11 people during the 1980s. Ng blamed Lake for the murders and said he had been inspired to capture the women after reading "The Collector."

In Fowles' novel, Miranda encourages her kidnapper to read "The Catcher in the Rye," hoping he might identify with Holden Caulfield's feelings of alienation. Her captor complains that he doesn't like the book and is annoyed that Holden doesn't try harder to fit into society. There are enough rumors about murders linked to J.D. Salinger's classic that the unwitting assassins in the Mel Gibson film "Conspiracy Theory" are portrayed as being brainwashed with the urge to buy the novel.

John Lennon's murderer, Mark David Chapman, was famously obsessed with "The Catcher in the Rye." Chapman wanted to change his name to Holden Caulfield and once wrote in a copy of the book "This is my statement," and signed the protagonist's name. He had a copy of the book in his possession when the police arrested him.

French author Max Valentin (a pseudonym) got more than he bargained for when he wrote "On the Path of the Golden Owl," a 1993 novel featuring clues to the location of a real-life buried treasure. France was gripped with treasure-hunting fever as readers tried to find a replica of the golden owl (which could be exchanged for the real one) that Valentin had buried somewhere in rural France. In an interview with the Times of London, the author said he had received death threats and bribes amid the torrent of mail from people wanting to know where the owl was hidden.

He does not customarily respond to questions about the owl's location, but once had to intervene to stop someone from digging up a cemetery. Others have gone even further. "There was one who tried to dig up a train track," he said, "and another who walked into a bank with a pickaxe and started to dig up the floor of the lobby. I've told everyone it is buried in a public place but some people are crazy ... a man had firebombed a church and left behind a book containing the message: 'The golden owl is underneath the chapel.'" After more than 10 years, no one has yet managed to find the golden owl.