J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger has died. He was 91. The author of Catcher in the Rye lived for decades in a small, remote house in tiny Cornish, New Hampshire - a state of self-imposed exile from a world of adoration and of fame that the author detested. If the history of pop culture is captured as a kind of ever growing quilt, Catcher in the Rye would be one of the central panels, its influence, for better, and often for worse, far-reaching and often impossible to calculate. In addition to the novel, published in 1951, offering the teenage Holden Caulfield, narcissist, deeply self-loathing, an adolescent who despite longing for redemption, refuses to allow himself to be saved, opting for sentimental stances instead, Salinger wrote the collection Nine Stories, that features the still mandatory reading of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” He also published Franny and Zooey, a novel about carefully articulated, self-absorption that acted as a handbook for a kind of privileged set of smart, disenfranchised youth.