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.

As might be expected, there are almost as many variations on the theme “the first time I read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’” as there are copies of the book in print. And in that respect it isn’t so dissimilar from how earlier generations must have remembered their initial encounters with the “Iliad” or “Hamlet” or “The Howdy-Doody Show.” The difference is that, in the case of Salinger, we seem to have the insatiable urge to share with him our experience of his work.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find a Web site dedicated to correspondence with the man who gave us Holden Caulfield and the Glass family and who followed them with more than 30 years of silence. Nor should we be disappointed if it offers little new in the way of biography: That site and the book that comes out of it this month are, ironically enough, the truest portrait we’ll likely ever have of Salinger.

He’ll never write back, not to the name-brand authors who have contributed to “Letters to J.D. Salinger” — Barry Gifford and Jim Harrison and George Plimpton — nor to the dozens of anonymous others. That doesn’t matter. Since he published his last book, Salinger has been alive, really, only in our imagination. By now, he can’t tell us anything we don’t already fundamentally know. If we honestly want to understand him, we need to read ourselves.

Of the few actual encounters with Salinger recalled in the book, the one thing all have in common is that they’re utterly, wonderfully, mundane. The novelist Herbert Gold recounts in his letter to J.D. an actual exchange by mail they had back in the ’60s, the closest we come to epistolary intimacy:

“Dear Mr. Salinger,
Some forty years ago, along with David Lloyd Stevenson, I was preparing an anthology that was published under the title, ‘Stories of Modern America.’ We requested permission from you to reprint one of your stories. You wrote a short note to deny us the privilege. Alas, your note seems to have disappeared … But the mysterious last sentence … is fixed in my memory. It read: ‘I have my reasons.’”

Gold goes on, with his typically insightful wit, to ponder what reasons Salinger might have had, reasons the stoic author so obviously intended to persuade nobody but himself. (“Did your rejection of our offer mean,” Gold asks, “that you wanted your story to be the only one in our anthology?”) Yet the greater significance to this tale isn’t what Salinger said, but rather that “the mysterious last sentence” hasn’t after all these years been forgotten by Gold.

“I have my reasons” is memorable because, without telling us anything about Salinger, it expresses our image of him as succinctly as the perfect epigram — or, better, epitaph. (After all, we’ve heard his last words. In every meaningful sense, Salinger is already gone.) “I have searched for clues to your disappearance,” writes Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, another “Letters” contributor. “When I first read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Franny and Zooey’ as a teenager, you had already stopped publishing more than three decades before. I figured you were dead.” If over time she’s modified her initial postmortem, it’s but slightly: “I can’t help but wondering why, for so many years, you’ve decided to play your music in the closet of your own making, leaving the rest of the world increasingly deaf.”

I figured you were dead: The truth is that, when we speak of J.D. in the present tense, it’s in the sense that we’d say “Ovid is the author of ‘The Metamorphoses,’” or even, maybe, “Narcissus is the author of his own fate.” It’s the present tense of timelessness, not the immediacy of now. The character we call J.D. Salinger is literary, and our interpretation of it is our legacy.

So it begins to make sense why the majority of encounters with Salinger found in these letters are at least a step removed from the man who once authored “Catcher.” “The girl I desire desperately to marry,” writes Darren Ursino on the Jdsalinger.com Web site, “is from your hometown, Cornish, NH, and, as things are in NH, her father works as a volunteer fireman and has been inside your house. Imagine that.” Or consider a note to Salinger from Dex Westrum, who writes, with strikingly direct honesty, “I was always looking for you.” In the late ’60s, Westrum taught English at Windsor High School in Vermont. “I learned that even though you lived in New Hampshire, you picked up your mail in Windsor,” he continues in his letter. “I never saw you at the post office.” Nor did he happen upon Salinger elsewhere: “The kids told me you talked to them, but you didn’t talk to adults because they would go around telling everybody they had talked to you.” Five years passed like that. Then, Westrum writes:

“In June of 1972 I decided to return to the Midwest. I was living in Woodstock then and the night before I left I took one last walk around. I stopped to look over an old desk in the window of an antique store. I felt a presence behind me and looked up at the reflection in the window and it was you. I looked right into the reflection’s eyes with a shock of recognition and you looked right into my eyes and nodded, Yes, and then shook your head, No. I waited until you walked down the street before I turned around.”

Westrum’s spectral evidence, like Ursino’s hearsay, sets Salinger apart from us in ways that seem strange when speaking of a person, yet are typical to the expression of myth. An urban legend is inevitably hearsay even to the one who relates it, and folklore speaks of beings seen but obliquely, out of reach, often under cover of night. Even if Salinger isn’t a pixie, hobgoblin or abominable snowman, he has attained in our vision an extra-human quality that puts him in a sort of conceptual purgatory between this world and the hereafter. It’s a strange place, largely unfamiliar to our matter-of-fact culture, a space we feel the need to enter, whether by seeking a chance meeting or composing letters to somebody who’s famous for throwing them away. “I don’t expect a response,” novelist Nicholas Delbanco writes in his note to J.D. “In some ways your silence determines our speech.” Or, a corollary: Salinger’s absence defines our presence.

That, then, explains why the vast majority of the correspondence in “Letters to J.D. Salinger” is in first rather than second person — why those writing to Salinger fall back on “the first time I read ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’” Short story writer Donald Anderson: “I was seventeen years old. The copy of Catcher I bought, I still have. It cost $1.25.” Poet Rachel Hadas: “I first read a paperback edition of Catcher. I forget the publisher (Avon? Pocket books?) and the price (25 cents?), but I clearly remember the shiny cover.” Novelist Robert O’Connor: “Here was the first time I connected to a character: someone who felt out of place, who yearned to escape, but didn’t know what from.” Short-story writer David Means: “My first glimpse of who I might be, my first invitation to become urbane, to shed my midwestern garb (except for the hunting cap with the earflaps to remind me of the hinterlands), to become hopefully not a phony but someone versed in spotting the phonies, came from your book.” Songwriter Ellis Paul: “I have read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ a half dozen times, and each time I’m older, though it’s still reading fine.” Salinger’s books, initially encountered so early, afford an opportunity for continuity in our lives. So long as we remember that first time with his fiction, we can always return, momentarily, to who we were then.

But remembering, like reading, is a private activity. Certainly we don’t need Salinger’s permission, or even acknowledgment, to bring us back. Who are we writing? One another?

Like any legendary figure, Salinger provides a means by which we can connect as a culture. Private as reading his books may be, experiencing his writing is something we hold in common. He is one man, essentially gone, but also Salinger is all of us. He is all of us as Ovid is ours, as we are all Narcissus, and those letters are an effective conduit for our collective thought. As the fate of Narcissus did in ancient culture, his life has become a metaphor for our entire society. (Novelist Joseph Skibell: “What, I wonder, is your famous retreat paradigmatic of?” George Plimpton: “Is there some hidden meaning here?”)

“When a stranger approaches me,” recounts fabulist John McFarland, “and proudly proclaims that he or she is a writer, I simply ask, ‘Are you J.D. Salinger?’ It stops them cold.” Nobody would ever claim to be that reclusive author. Yet, in his purgatory, there is already a little of him, his legend, in everybody.

Margaret (Peggy) Salinger’s memoir of her life and of her father, J.D. Salinger, “Dream Catcher,” exposes the cracks in the facade of the Salinger mystique. But the truth was always there in J.D. Salinger’s fiction. More than 35 years ago, the late Mary McCarthy, writing in Harper’s magazine, applied her considerable faculties to Salinger’s oeuvre; what she found in it, to use her own word, was “terrifying.”

Peggy Salinger was born in 1955, the year “Franny and Zooey” was published in the New Yorker. Although “terrifying” isn’t a word that the remarkably generous Peggy uses to describe her life, she has suffered from bulimia, perceptual distortions, panic attacks, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. And, she says, “parts of me, little encapsulated personalities jettisoned during retreat, may well have died or are, at least, lost forever … I have spent years, with doctors and friends beside me, cruising the archipelago, calling out, ‘All-y all-y in come free.’”

J.D. Salinger’s work still has tremendous power, especially for young readers. (At last check, “The Catcher in the Rye” was No. 172 on Amazon.com’s bestseller list, nearly 50 years after it was first published.) In the ’50s and ’60s he was a code word. Carrying a copy of any of his books was a sign that you knew. Holden Caulfield, the caustic narrator of “The Catcher in the Rye,” added the word “phony” to the common lexicon. Later, Salinger introduced the Glass kids, a fictional family of seven former wunderkinds (two dead), all geniuses, who were uniquely sensitive and uniquely close, and through them Salinger introduced Zen Buddhism and meditation to the general public. “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (two novellas) and other works serialized the story of the fictional siblings as they spiritually suffered over all things phony or second-rate.

Yet, the stories of both Holden and the Glass family share a not-so-attractive quality. And it was this aspect of Salinger, a tendency to draw lines and to rate people, that McCarthy, in her essay “J.D. Salinger’s Closed Circuit,” pointed out: “Like Hemingway, Salinger sees the world in terms of allies and enemies … ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ … is based on a scheme of exclusiveness. The characters are divided into those who belong to the club and those who don’t.”

In Salinger’s life, one could belong to this club and then get thrown out. Joyce Maynard, in her memoir “At Home in the World,” reports that in the early ’70s, after living with Salinger for eight months, she was unceremoniously booted out of his life. Eighteen years old to Salinger’s 53, she spent the next 20 years wondering what it was that she had done. Ten-year-old Peggy Salinger was warned about this possibility, too. After an argument, Salinger told his daughter, “I’ll always love you, but when I lose respect for a person, I’m done with them. Finished.”

Respect is more highly valued than love, it would seem — even when it comes to a 10-year-old daughter. It was not until Peggy Salinger was an adult and rereading her father’s work that she noticed Zooey had this to say to his sister, Franny: “And don’t tell me that you were ten years old. Your age has nothing do with what I’m talking about. There are no big changes between ten or twenty — or ten and eighty, for that matter.”

Salinger was certainly aware that she had fictional siblings. “Unlike me, his ten-year-old characters, my fictional siblings, were perfect, flawless, reflections of what my father likes.” Of herself and her father when she was a child, she writes, “I managed to stay in his good graces most of the time, to be the swell girl … but the price of admission was steep.” At the age of 5, she showed a remarkable insight into her father’s personality when she told him, “You only like people homeopathically” — meaning he only liked people in small doses, and only people who were like him.

Perhaps the most startling information she gives us about her father, and the most sympathetic, is how much he identified with being a soldier. That, and the rampant and acceptable anti-Semitism of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, might very well explain his contempt for WASPs. Yet his experience in the Army during World War II seems to be the only time in his life when anything broke through his self-absorption. “For Esmi — With Love and Squalor,” the story of a soldier fighting off a nervous breakdown brought on by war, remains in many critics’ minds his most genuinely effective story.

In the Glass family series, Buddy Glass, the second born and the family writer, was taken to be Salinger’s fictional alter ego. Yet, as Peggy Salinger writes, her father, although not concerned with her school grades, exhorted her to read the same books that are found in Buddy’s brother Seymour’s bedroom: Tolstoy, Ring Lardner, Kafka, Mu Mon Kwan and so on. And in still another character, Zooey, she recognized the same words and same apologies about commandeering a room that she heard from her father: “We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound. At least I do.” Zooey is filled with remorse about his boorish behavior, as Salinger says her father was.

That Salinger can be found in every character he created was a problem for McCarthy. “And who are these wonder kids,” she wrote, “but Salinger himself, splitting and multiplying like the original amoeba?” If this statement did not spell out the problem clearly enough, she restated her insight even more succinctly. “To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool.”

Toward the end of her memoir, Salinger considers whether her father had been an “illusion”; McCarthy essentially asked the same question. Hovering over the Glass family is Seymour, eldest brother, the greatest genius of all the Glass geniuses, a mystic, poet, perhaps even a saint, who commits suicide in the story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Seymour’s legacy to his siblings is his letters, the books found in his old bedroom (which is kept, shrinelike, exactly as it was when he was alive) and the famous epiphany he passed on: The Fat Lady is Jesus.

That J.D. Salinger allows Seymour’s suicide to remain a mystery does not, in McCarthy’s view, mean that Seymour is genuinely mysterious. And at the end of her essay, she finally drew her chilling conclusion:

Seymour’s suicide suggests that Salinger guesses intermittently or fears intermittently that there may be something wrong somewhere. Why did he kill himself? Because he married a phony, whom he worshiped for her “simplicity, her terrible honesty”? Or because he was so happy and the Fat Lady’s world was so wonderful? Or because he had been lying, his author had been lying, and it was all terrible, and he was a fake?

In 1961 and ’62, a few years before Salinger stopped publishing, he came in for the toughest criticism of his publishing life. John Updike, a young Joan Didion, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler — all voiced their reservations about his work, despite Salinger’s charismatic language and extraordinary popularity.

For Updike, Salinger was “never strong on composition,” but a chronicler of “static” subjectivity. Fiedler took seriously Salinger’s religious leanings (as expressed in “Franny and Zooey”), but still couldn’t help being disappointed with all that was “cute” within the work. And Didion, no stranger to matters of high stylization or self-absorption herself, thought his work was “brilliantly rendered” but also “spurious” because of “Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living.”

But it was McCarthy’s essay that got the whole and not the parts in Salinger’s weakness. While other critics were intimidated by Salinger’s genius for language, McCarthy, in an assessment that was honest, plain-spoken and brilliant, was ultimately democratic. She did not dismiss Salinger’s writing ability, but nor did she overvalue it, writing, in one example, “These imprints of the Glass collective personality are preserved as though they were Veronica’s veil in a relic case of well-wrote prose.” She noted Salinger’s tendency to attribute mystical intimations in everything associated with the family, even to what are essentially empty gestures. “A great deal of attention,” she wrote, “is paid to the rituals of cigarette lighting and drinking from a glass, as though these oral acts were sacred — epiphanies.” And so the reader is able to see the “closed circuitry,” the elitism, within the work.

McCarthy’s essay is literary criticism at its best — careful reading, done with an educated eye and common sense. The peculiarly destructive quality McCarthy identified, the “terrifying narcissus pool,” is one we disregard, even as readers, at our peril. Criticism, so often regarded as the poor cousin to art or the seedy parasite feeding off noble artists, can and does make a difference. It isn’t as if Peggy Salinger has debunked a great hero — the truth about Salinger was always there, in his fiction. We just didn’t bother to really read him.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger (in “Nine Stories”)

Salinger’s classic takes place in a Florida hotel, over the course of a single afternoon. Up in Room 507, Muriel Glass polishes her nails and speaks to her mother on the phone. Out on the beach, her husband, Seymour, lies on the sand in his bathrobe, takes a little girl into the ocean and kisses the arch of her foot. From three spare scenes, we apprehend an entire tragedy.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Chapters 27-32)

“Le grand moment” of the novel: Humbert Humbert whisks Lolita out of Camp Q and into the Enchanted Hunters, “that venerable place full of perspiring philistines and period objects.” Outside on the porch, Quilty’s onto the seduction-in-progress. By morning, Humbert discovers that he is not even Lolita’s first lover.

“To Room Nineteen” by Doris Lessing (in “Stories”)

Susan Rawlings, a frustrated housewife seeking freedom from her family, repeatedly escapes her house in suburban London to spend a few solitary hours doing absolutely nothing in a shabby hotel near Paddington Station. A chilling portrait of the terrors of depression.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Has any man pined as profoundly, and as pathetically, as Gustav Aschenbach? Beautiful descriptions of the Lido in its glamorous heyday, and of Tadzio, the world’s most beautiful boy.

Eloise by Kay Thompson (Drawings by Hilary Knight)

Confessions of a pint-size eccentric who lives with her nanny, her dog and her turtle in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Highlights: Eloise combing her hair with a fork, wearing an egg cup on her head. To quote our impish guide, “Merci and charge it please.”