This Day In Literary History
On July 16th, 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, the classic novel by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published. Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Highly intelligent but mentally disturbed, the angry, alienated Holden believes that his fellow students and his teachers are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and is beaten by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious ten-year-old little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy (a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's Comin' Through The Rye) where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must become a "catcher in the rye" and protect them from falling off the cliff.
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs. He compliments Holden's good looks.
Later that night, Holden is awakened to find Mr. Antolini stroking his head in a "flitty" way. Holden describes this as "something perverty." Mr. Antolini's marriage may be a sham to conceal his true nature.
When Holden tells Phoebe that he plans to move out West, she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
Watching with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel, he alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September. That's just a bare outline of The Catcher in the Rye.
You must read this novel for yourself. Though it was published during the Beat era and reflected the disillusionment of its youth, The Catcher in the Rye isn't a typical Beat novel. Its protagonist was more a reflection of the author's own mental health issues.
After serving in World War II and witnessing its horrors, including being one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp, J.D Salinger was committed to a hospital for mentally ill soldiers. He was more than just shell shocked.
Though he recovered (sort of) and served six more months of "denazification" duty in Germany before returning home to civilian life, he would suffer from deep psychological scars until the day he died.
One of his few happy wartime memories was meeting a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway in Paris, who said of him, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men struck up a friendship and wrote to each other.
Salinger had been drafted in the spring of 1942; in December of 1941, right before Pearl Harbor, he'd sold a short story called Slight Rebellion Off Madison to the New Yorker magazine - his first work to feature our favorite antihero, Holden Caulfield. Unfortunately, after Pearl Harbor, the magazine deemed the story unpublishable.
One of the greatest American novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial, the American Library Association (ALA) has listed The Catcher in the Rye as the 13th most challenged book from 1990 to 2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005.
The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy. Opponents of the book have also complained about the undermining of family values - Holden Caulfield being a poor role model who promotes rebellion, smoking, drinking, lying, and promiscuity.
In 1989, Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher in Boron, California, was fired after some disgruntled parents complained about her placement of The Catcher in the Rye on her students' assigned reading list. She was later reinstated.
Throughout his life, J.D. Salinger rebuffed attempts at adapting his classic novel for the stage and screen. When his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was adapted as a film called My Foolish Heart, great liberties were taken. The film bore little resemblance to Salinger's story.
The movie, which Salinger hated, turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. He vowed that no more of his works would be adapted. In 1961, Salinger denied legendary film and stage director Elia Kazan permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye as a Broadway play.
Acclaimed filmmakers from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg expressed great interest in directing a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, and many famous actors have expressed great interest in playing Holden Caulfield.
Big name actors from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have coveted the role of Salinger's antihero. John Cusack said that after he turned 21, he regretted that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield.
Ever since J.D. Salinger died in January of 2010 at the age of 91, speculation has run rampant that a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye will finally be made. Until then, everyone should read the novel, which is one of the all-time great works of American literature.
Quote Of The Day “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye. Enjoy!
Happy New Year! The Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of its members and blog readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive new year in 2026! This Day In Literary History
On January 1st, 1919, the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger was born. He was born Jerome David Salinger in New York City. His mother Marie was Scotch-Irish, his father Sol was Polish-Jewish and earned his living by selling kosher cheese.
J.D. had an older sister, Doris, who died in 2001. His mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed herself off as Jewish. He would not learn of her true identity until after his bar mitzvah.
J.D. Salinger attended public schools until ninth grade, when he transferred to the private McBurney School. He acted in several school plays and showed a talent for drama, but his father was against him becoming an actor.
Later, he entered the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. There, he was able to get away from his overprotective mother. He had begun writing for the McBurney School newspaper; at the military academy, he wrote stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight."
In 1936, at the age of 17, Salinger entered New York University, where he considered studying special education, but he dropped out the following spring. His father wanted him to learn the meat-importing business.
So, he went to work for a company in Vienna, Austria. He spent only six months in Austria, leaving shortly before the country was annexed by Hitler in the spring of 1938.
After spending a semester at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Salinger attended a writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine.
Burnett noted that Salinger was an average student at first, but then, about three weeks before the end of the second semester, "he suddenly came to life" and wrote three stories, all of which impressed Burnett. He praised Salinger's talent and accepted one of his stories, The Young Folks, for publication in Story magazine.
In 1941, Salinger met and began dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he found her to be a self-absorbed debutante, he fell in love with her. He called her often and wrote her long letters.
Unfortunately, their relationship ended when Oona began dating film legend Charlie Chaplin, whom she would later marry. That same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker magazine, which rejected seven of them.
However, in December of 1941, the magazine accepted Slight Rebellion Off Madison, a short story that introduced Salinger's most popular character - a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield, who had "pre-war jitters."
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the story was deemed unpublishable. It would not appear in The New Yorker until 1946. Several months after the Pearl Harbor attack, in the spring of 1942, J.D. Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army.
He saw action with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge. During the Normandy campaign, he arranged to meet a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway, who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.
Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, despite his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed with Salinger's writing, saying of the author, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men began corresponding; Salinger would later say that his talks with Hemingway were among his few positive memories of the war.
As the war continued, Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his fluency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He would become one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.
He later told his daughter, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." The war would leave lifelong psychological scars on Salinger; he had to be hospitalized for combat stress, aka PTSD, for a few weeks after V.E. Day.
After he recovered, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "denazification" duty in Germany. During this time, he fell in love with and married a German girl named Sylvia Welter. He brought her back with him to the U.S., but the marriage only lasted eight months, and Sylvia returned to Germany.
In the late 1940s, Salinger became a follower of Zen Buddhism, the first of many spiritual pursuits. He resumed his writing career, and in 1948, submitted a new story to The New Yorker titled A Perfect Day For Bananafish. The editors were so impressed with the story that they accepted it right away and signed the author to a contract.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish was the first story that introduced Salinger's recurring characters, the troubled Glass family, consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious kids, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Walker, Zooey, and Franny.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish featured Seymour Glass. On a second honeymoon with his wife Muriel, Seymour spends a day at the beach while Muriel remains in their hotel room, talking to her mother on the phone.
At the beach, Seymour meets and befriends Sybil Carpenter, a cute and inquisitive six-year-old girl. He enjoys her company and tells her a story about bananafish. Later, Seymour returns to his hotel room and finds his wife asleep. Removing a gun from his luggage, he sits next to Muriel on the bed and blows his brains out.
Not long after the success of Bananafish, Salinger was approached by film producer Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to buy the rights to his earlier short story, Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut. Salinger immediately agreed, as Hollywood had shown interest in another of his stories, The Varoni Brothers, but nothing ever came of it.
Salinger hoped that Uncle Wiggily "would make a good movie," but when it was released as My Foolish Heart in 1949, the film was a critical and commercial failure and had little to do with the story on which it was based.
A furious Salinger vowed that no more film adaptations of his work would be made - a vow he kept for the rest of his life, despite Hollywood's persistent interest in adapting his celebrated first novel, which was published in 1951, just a couple of years after the Uncle Wiggily film fiasco.
The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story, opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Holden is an angry, alienated young man who may be losing his mind. He believes that his teachers and fellow students are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and gets assaulted by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy - a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's song Comin' Through The Rye - where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must make sure that they don't wander too close to the edge; he must become a "catcher in the rye."
After leaving the apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs.
Later that night, Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a "flitty" way. Whether or not this is a sexual advance is up for speculation and ultimately left to the reader to decide.
When Holden tells his little sister that he plans to move out West, Phoebe wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
He watches with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel. He alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September.
That's just a bare outline of The Catcher In The Rye. You must read it for yourself. It's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial.
The American Library Association (ALA) has listed it as the 13th most challenged book from 1990-2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005. The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy.
When high school English teachers assign the book to their classes, they are often met with protests from disgruntled parents and conservative activist groups who demand that the book be removed from both the teachers' assigned reading lists and the school libraries' shelves.
J.D. Salinger followed his famous novel with a short story collection, Nine Stories, (1953) which would include both A Perfect Day For Bananafish and another celebrated tale, For Esme - With Love And Squalor. The haunting, poingant story is narrated by an American Army officer known only as Staff Sergeant X.
While waiting to be sent into combat, Staff Sergeant X goes to an English tearoom, where a young teenage British girl named Esme approaches him and offers to write to him. He immediately agrees.
Thirty minutes later, Esme leaves, telling X "I hope you return with all your faculties intact." It's because of Esme's letter, which he receives on V.E. Day, that X, confined to a mental hospital for combat stress, is able to regain his faculties.
In 1955, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student with whom he would have two children, Margaret and Matthew. He continued to write and publish short stories. In 1961, he published a short novel, Franny And Zooey, which originally appeared as two separate short stories in The New Yorker.
The book tells another story of the Glass family, narrated by Buddy Glass, who tells of how his sister Franny, a college student, has a Holden Caulfield-esque nervous breakdown while having lunch with her boyfriend Lane, troubled by the phoniness of her classmates and the egotism of the faculty.
At the request of their mother, Franny's brother Zooey helps her recover from her nervous breakdown through a long and intimate talk wherein he helps her sort out her personal and spiritual beliefs.
J.D. Salinger would continue to publish sporadically. In June of 1965, his last published work, a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the New Yorker. Afterward, at the age of 47, Salinger retired from writing, tired of all the media attention his novel The Catcher In The Rye continued to bring him.
He began to withdraw from public life. His last interview was given in 1980. Then he became a recluse, appearing only to defend his privacy and his works in court. In 1986, British biographer Ian Hamilton planned to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger - A Writing Life (1935-65).
Salinger learned that the book contained a collection of letters that he'd written to friends and fellow authors, so he sued to halt its publication. After two years of legal wrangling, the biography was published in a revised version, with the letters' contents paraphrased.
In 1995, Salinger had his lawyers block the American premiere of Pari, an unauthorized adaptation of Franny And Zooey by Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui. And in June of 2009, Salinger obtained an injunction to block the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye.
The novel was an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher In The Rye, written by Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J.D. California. Colting filed an appeal, which resulted in a settlement in 2011.
As part of the settlement, Colting agreed not to publish his book in the U.S. and Canada until The Catcher In The Rye enters the public domain in those countries. He also agreed not to use the title Coming Through The Rye.
In 1999, Salinger's daughter Margaret published a memoir, Dream Catcher, where she depicted her father as a control freak who exerted harrowing control over her mother and suffered from severe post traumatic stress disorder all his life.
Margaret claimed that Salinger maintained his service haircut, wore his Army jacket, and drove around his estate (and town) in an old Jeep. She dispelled the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton in his book.
She also discussed her father's passion for films; despite his negative experiences with Hollywood studios, Salinger was a huge film buff and owned a large collection of 16mm film prints.
A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret Salinger's brother Matthew wrote a letter to the New York Observer denouncing his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and discrediting her memoir.
J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91. His classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye, may finally be adapted as a feature film; in a letter written in 1957, Salinger stated that he would be open to an adaptation after his death as a means of providing for his widow and children.
Four years after Salinger's death, a collection of three of his early stories was published. It was followed in 2018 by a Centennial Edition boxed set comprised of four deluxe hardcover editions containing all the writings Salinger published during his lifetime.
A collection of his unpublished works is expected to be released as well.
Quote Of The Day "When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, A Perfect Day For Bananafish. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 16th, 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, the classic novel by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published. Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Highly intelligent but mentally disturbed, the angry, alienated Holden believes that his fellow students and his teachers are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and is beaten by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious ten-year-old little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy (a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's Comin' Through The Rye) where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must become a "catcher in the rye" and protect them from falling off the cliff.
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs. He compliments Holden's good looks.
Later that night, Holden is awakened to find Mr. Antolini stroking his head in a "flitty" way. Holden describes this as "something perverty." Mr. Antolini's marriage may be a sham to conceal his true nature.
When Holden tells Phoebe that he plans to move out West, she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
Watching with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel, he alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September. That's just a bare outline of The Catcher in the Rye.
You must read this novel for yourself. Though it was published during the Beat era and reflected the disillusionment of its youth, The Catcher in the Rye isn't a typical Beat novel. Its protagonist was more a reflection of the author's own mental health issues.
After serving in World War II and witnessing its horrors, including being one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp, J.D Salinger was committed to a hospital for mentally ill soldiers. He was more than just shell shocked.
Though he recovered (sort of) and served six more months of "denazification" duty in Germany before returning home to civilian life, he would suffer from deep psychological scars until the day he died.
One of his few happy wartime memories was meeting a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway in Paris, who said of him, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men struck up a friendship and wrote to each other.
Salinger had been drafted in the spring of 1942; in December of 1941, right before Pearl Harbor, he'd sold a short story called Slight Rebellion Off Madison to the New Yorker magazine - his first work to feature our favorite antihero, Holden Caulfield. Unfortunately, after Pearl Harbor, the magazine deemed the story unpublishable.
One of the greatest American novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial, the American Library Association (ALA) has listed The Catcher in the Rye as the 13th most challenged book from 1990 to 2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005.
The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy. Opponents of the book have also complained about the undermining of family values - Holden Caulfield being a poor role model who promotes rebellion, smoking, drinking, lying, and promiscuity.
In 1989, Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher in Boron, California, was fired after some disgruntled parents complained about her placement of The Catcher in the Rye on her students' assigned reading list. She was later reinstated.
Throughout his life, J.D. Salinger rebuffed attempts at adapting his classic novel for the stage and screen. When his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was adapted as a film called My Foolish Heart, great liberties were taken. The film bore little resemblance to Salinger's story.
The movie, which Salinger hated, turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. He vowed that no more of his works would be adapted. In 1961, Salinger denied legendary film and stage director Elia Kazan permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye as a Broadway play.
Acclaimed filmmakers from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg expressed great interest in directing a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, and many famous actors have expressed great interest in playing Holden Caulfield.
Big name actors from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have coveted the role of Salinger's antihero. John Cusack said that after he turned 21, he regretted that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield.
Ever since J.D. Salinger died in January of 2010 at the age of 91, speculation has run rampant that a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye will finally be made. Until then, everyone should read the novel, which is one of the all-time great works of American literature.
Quote Of The Day “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye. Enjoy!
Happy New Year! The Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of its members and blog readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive new year in 2025! This Day In Literary History
On January 1st, 1919, the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger was born. He was born Jerome David Salinger in New York City. His mother Marie was Scotch-Irish, his father Sol was Polish-Jewish and earned his living by selling kosher cheese.
J.D. had an older sister, Doris, who died in 2001. His mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed herself off as Jewish. He would not learn of her true identity until after his bar mitzvah.
J.D. Salinger attended public schools until ninth grade, when he transferred to the private McBurney School. He acted in several school plays and showed a talent for drama, but his father was opposed to him becoming an actor.
Later, he entered the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. There, he was able to get away from his overprotective mother. He had begun writing for the McBurney School newspaper; at the military academy, he wrote stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight."
In 1936, at the age of 17, Salinger entered New York University, where he considered studying special education, but he dropped out the following spring. His father wanted him to learn the meat-importing business.
So, he went to work for a company in Vienna, Austria. He spent only six months in Austria, leaving shortly before the country was annexed by Hitler in the spring of 1938.
After spending a semester at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Salinger attended a writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine.
Burnett noted that Salinger was an average student at first, but then, about three weeks before the end of the second semester, "he suddenly came to life" and wrote three stories, all of which impressed Burnett. He praised Salinger's talent and accepted one of his stories, The Young Folks, for publication in Story magazine.
In 1941, Salinger met and began dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he found her to be a self-absorbed debutante, he fell in love with her. He called her often and wrote her long letters.
Unfortunately, their relationship ended when Oona began dating film legend Charlie Chaplin, whom she would later marry. That same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker magazine, which rejected seven of them.
However, in December of 1941, the magazine accepted Slight Rebellion Off Madison, a short story that introduced Salinger's most popular character - a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield, who had "pre-war jitters."
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the story was deemed unpublishable. It would not appear in The New Yorker until 1946. Several months after the Pearl Harbor attack, in the spring of 1942, J.D. Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army.
He saw action with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge. During the Normandy campaign, he arranged to meet a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway, who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.
Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, despite his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed with Salinger's writing, saying of the author, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men began corresponding; Salinger would later say that his talks with Hemingway were among his few positive memories of the war.
As the war continued, Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his fluency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He would become one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.
He later told his daughter, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." The war would leave lifelong psychological scars on Salinger; he had to be hospitalized for combat stress, aka PTSD, for a few weeks after V.E. Day.
After he recovered, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "denazification" duty in Germany. During this time, he fell in love with and married a German girl named Sylvia Welter. He brought her back with him to the U.S., but the marriage only lasted eight months, and Sylvia returned to Germany.
In the late 1940s, Salinger became a follower of Zen Buddhism, the first of many spiritual pursuits. He resumed his writing career, and in 1948, submitted a new story to The New Yorker titled A Perfect Day For Bananafish. The editors were so impressed with the story that they accepted it right away and signed the author to a contract.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish was the first story that introduced Salinger's recurring characters, the troubled Glass family, consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious kids, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Walker, Zooey, and Franny.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish featured Seymour Glass. On a second honeymoon with his wife Muriel, Seymour spends a day at the beach while Muriel remains in their hotel room, talking to her mother on the phone.
At the beach, Seymour meets and befriends Sybil Carpenter, a cute and inquisitive six-year-old girl. He enjoys her company and tells her a story about bananafish. Later, Seymour returns to his hotel room and finds his wife asleep. Removing a gun from his luggage, he sits next to Muriel on the bed and blows his brains out.
Not long after the success of Bananafish, Salinger was approached by film producer Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to buy the rights to his earlier short story, Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut. Salinger immediately agreed, as Hollywood had shown interest in another of his stories, The Varoni Brothers, but nothing ever came of it.
Salinger hoped that Uncle Wiggily "would make a good movie," but when it was released as My Foolish Heart in 1949, the film was a critical and commercial failure and had little to do with the story on which it was based.
A furious Salinger vowed that no more film adaptations of his work would be made - a vow he kept for the rest of his life, despite Hollywood's persistent interest in adapting his celebrated first novel, which was published in 1951, just a couple of years after the Uncle Wiggily film fiasco.
The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story, opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Holden is an angry, alienated young man who may be losing his mind. He believes that his teachers and fellow students are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and gets assaulted by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy - a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's song Comin' Through The Rye - where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must make sure that they don't wander too close to the edge; he must become a "catcher in the rye."
After leaving the apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs.
Later that night, Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a "flitty" way. Whether or not this is a sexual advance is up for speculation and ultimately left to the reader to decide.
When Holden tells his little sister that he plans to move out West, Phoebe wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
He watches with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel. He alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September.
That's just a bare outline of The Catcher In The Rye. You must read it for yourself. It's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial.
The American Library Association (ALA) has listed it as the 13th most challenged book from 1990-2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005. The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy.
When high school English teachers assign the book to their classes, they are often met with protests from disgruntled parents and conservative activist groups who demand that the book be removed from both the teachers' assigned reading lists and the school libraries' shelves.
J.D. Salinger followed his famous novel with a short story collection, Nine Stories, (1953) which would include both A Perfect Day For Bananafish and another celebrated tale, For Esme - With Love And Squalor. The haunting, poingant story is narrated by an American Army officer known only as Staff Sergeant X.
While waiting to be sent into combat, Staff Sergeant X goes to an English tearoom, where a young teenage British girl named Esme approaches him and offers to write to him. He immediately agrees.
Thirty minutes later, Esme leaves, telling X "I hope you return with all your faculties intact." It's because of Esme's letter, which he receives on V.E. Day, that X, confined to a mental hospital for combat stress, is able to regain his faculties.
In 1955, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student with whom he would have two children, Margaret and Matthew. He continued to write and publish short stories. In 1961, he published a short novel, Franny And Zooey, which originally appeared as two separate short stories in The New Yorker.
The book tells another story of the Glass family, narrated by Buddy Glass, who tells of how his sister Franny, a college student, has a Holden Caulfield-esque nervous breakdown while having lunch with her boyfriend Lane, troubled by the phoniness of her classmates and the egotism of the faculty.
At the request of their mother, Franny's brother Zooey helps her recover from her nervous breakdown through a long and intimate talk wherein he helps her sort out her personal and spiritual beliefs.
J.D. Salinger would continue to publish sporadically. In June of 1965, his last published work, a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the New Yorker. Afterward, at the age of 47, Salinger retired from writing, tired of all the media attention his novel The Catcher In The Rye continued to bring him.
He began to withdraw from public life. His last interview was given in 1980. Then he became a recluse, appearing only to defend his privacy and his works in court. In 1986, British biographer Ian Hamilton planned to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger - A Writing Life (1935-65).
Salinger learned that the book contained a collection of letters that he'd written to friends and fellow authors, so he sued to halt its publication. After two years of legal wrangling, the biography was published in a revised version, with the letters' contents paraphrased.
In 1995, Salinger had his lawyers block the American premiere of Pari, an unauthorized adaptation of Franny And Zooey by Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui. And in June of 2009, Salinger obtained an injunction to block the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye.
The novel was an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher In The Rye, written by Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J.D. California. Colting filed an appeal, which resulted in a settlement in 2011.
As part of the settlement, Colting agreed not to publish his book in the U.S. and Canada until The Catcher In The Rye enters the public domain in those countries. He also agreed not to use the title Coming Through The Rye.
In 1999, Salinger's daughter Margaret published a memoir, Dream Catcher, where she depicted her father as a control freak who exerted harrowing control over her mother and suffered from severe post traumatic stress disorder all his life.
Margaret claimed that Salinger maintained his service haircut, wore his Army jacket, and drove around his estate (and town) in an old Jeep. She dispelled the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton in his book.
She also discussed her father's passion for films; despite his negative experiences with Hollywood studios, Salinger was a huge film buff and owned a large collection of 16mm film prints.
A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret Salinger's brother Matthew wrote a letter to the New York Observer denouncing his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and discrediting her memoir.
J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91. His classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye, may finally be adapted as a feature film; in a letter written in 1957, Salinger stated that he would be open to an adaptation after his death as a means of providing for his widow and children.
Four years after Salinger's death, a collection of three of his early stories was published. It was followed in 2018 by a Centennial Edition boxed set comprised of four deluxe hardcover editions containing all the writings Salinger published during his lifetime.
A collection of his unpublished works is expected to be released as well.
Quote Of The Day "When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion."
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, A Perfect Day For Bananafish. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 16th, 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, the classic novel by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published. Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Highly intelligent but mentally disturbed, the angry, alienated Holden believes that his fellow students and his teachers are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and is beaten by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious ten-year-old little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy (a misinterpretation of Robert Burns's Comin' Through The Rye) where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must become a "catcher in the rye" and protect them from falling off the cliff.
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs. He compliments Holden's good looks.
Later that night, Holden is awakened to find Mr. Antolini stroking his head in a "flitty" way. Holden describes this as "something perverty." Mr. Antolini's marriage may be a sham to conceal his true nature.
When Holden tells Phoebe that he plans to move out West, she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
Watching with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel, he alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September. That's just a bare outline of The Catcher in the Rye.
You must read this novel for yourself. Though it was published during the Beat era and reflected the disillusionment of its youth, The Catcher in the Rye isn't a typical Beat novel. Its protagonist was more a reflection of the author's own mental health issues.
After serving in World War II and witnessing its horrors, including being one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp, J.D Salinger was committed to a hospital for mentally ill soldiers. He was more than just shell shocked.
Though he recovered (sort of) and served six more months of "denazification" duty in Germany before returning home to civilian life, Salinger would suffer from deep psychological scars until the day he died.
One of the greatest American novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial, the American Library Association (ALA) has listed The Catcher in the Rye as the 13th most challenged book from 1990 to 2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005.
The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy. Opponents of the book have also complained about the undermining of family values - Holden Caulfield being a poor role model who promotes rebellion, smoking, drinking, lying, and promiscuity.
In 1989, Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher in Boron, California, was fired after some disgruntled parents complained about her placement of The Catcher in the Rye on her students' assigned reading list. She was later reinstated.
Throughout his life, J.D. Salinger rebuffed attempts at adapting his classic novel for the stage and screen. When his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was adapted as a film called My Foolish Heart, great liberties were taken. The film bore little resemblance to Salinger's story.
The movie, which Salinger hated, turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. He vowed that no more of his works would be adapted. In 1961, Salinger denied legendary film and stage director Elia Kazan permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye as a Broadway play.
Acclaimed filmmakers from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg expressed great interest in directing a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, and many famous actors have expressed great interest in playing Holden Caulfield.
Big name actors from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have coveted the role of Salinger's antihero. John Cusack said that after he turned 21, he regretted that he had become too old to play Holden.
Ever since J.D. Salinger died in January of 2010 at the age of 91, speculation has run rampant that a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye will finally be made. Until then, everyone should read the novel, which is one of the all-time great works of American literature.
Quote Of The Day “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”
- J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 16th, 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, the classic novel by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published. Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Highly intelligent but mentally disturbed, the angry, alienated Holden believes that his fellow students and his teachers are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and is beaten by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious ten-year-old little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy (a misinterpretation of Robert Burns' Comin' Through The Rye) where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must become a "catcher in the rye" and protect them from falling off the cliff.
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs. He compliments Holden's good looks.
Later that night, Holden is awakened to find Mr. Antolini stroking his head in a "flitty" way. Holden describes this as "something perverty." Mr. Antolini's marriage may be a sham to conceal his true nature.
When Holden tells Phoebe that he plans to move out West, she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
Watching with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel, he alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September. That's just a bare outline of The Catcher in the Rye.
You must read this novel for yourself. Though it was published during the Beat era and reflected the disillusionment of its youth, The Catcher in the Rye isn't a typical Beat novel. Its protagonist was more a reflection of the author's own mental health issues.
After serving in World War II and witnessing its horrors, including being one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp, J.D Salinger was committed to a hospital for mentally ill soldiers. He was more than just shell shocked.
Though he recovered (sort of) and served six more months of "denazification" duty in Germany before returning home to civilian life, Salinger would suffer from deep psychological scars until the day he died.
One of the greatest American novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial, the American Library Association (ALA) has listed The Catcher in the Rye as the 13th most challenged book from 1990 to 2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005.
The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy. Opponents of the book have also complained about the undermining of family values - Holden Caulfield being a poor role model who promotes rebellion, smoking, drinking, lying, and promiscuity.
In 1989, Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher in Boron, California, was fired after some disgruntled parents complained about her placement of The Catcher in the Rye on her students' assigned reading list. She was later reinstated.
Throughout his life, J.D. Salinger rebuffed attempts at adapting his classic novel for the stage and screen. When his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was adapted as a film called My Foolish Heart, great liberties were taken, and the film bore little resemblance to Salinger's story.
The movie, which Salinger hated, turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. He vowed that no more of his works would be adapted. In 1961, Salinger denied legendary film and stage director Elia Kazan permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye as a Broadway play.
Acclaimed filmmakers from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg expressed great interest in directing a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, and many famous actors have expressed great interest in playing Holden Caulfield.
Big name actors from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have coveted the role of Salinger's antihero. John Cusack said that after he turned 21, he regretted that he had become too old to play Holden.
Ever since J.D. Salinger died in January of 2010 at the age of 91, speculation has run rampant that a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye will finally be made. Until then, everyone should read the novel, which is one of the all-time classic works of literature.
Quote Of The Day “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.” - J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On April 8th, 1950, For Esmè - with Love and Squalor, the classic short story by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published in The New Yorker.
Set during World War II and based in part on the author's own experiences during the conflict, the story's narrator is an American ex-soldier who refers to himself as Staff Sergeant X.
It opens with X receiving an invitation to a wedding in England. He wants to go, but he can't because his mother-in-law is coming to visit at that time. So, he decides to make "a few revealing notes about the bride as I knew her almost six years ago."
The story then flashes back to Devon, England, circa 1944, where X is stationed along with some 60 other American soldiers as part of a secret three-week training program for an upcoming invasion - the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
On his last day of training, after packing his bags, X takes a final walk through Devon and ends up at a church where a children's choir practice is taking place. He finds himself entranced by the singing of one particular child.
She's a thirteen-year-old girl “with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house.” Hers is the “sweetest-sounding” voice, though she seems “bored with her own singing ability.”
X leaves the church. Later, he goes to a tea room, where he orders tea and cinnamon toast. The girl he'd seen singing at the church enters the room, along with a little boy and "an efficient looking woman." They sit a few tables down from him.
When the girl notices X staring at her, she gets up and walks over to him. She is surprised to see him at the tea room, because she "thought all Americans despised tea." X asks her if she'd like to join him, and she accepts the invitation.
As they engage in a conversation, the girl, whose name is Esmè, surprises X with her precociousness when she asks him if he goes “to that secret Intelligence school on the hill.” She also asks him if he's married.
Esmè describes herself as "a terribly cold person" and says that she's teaching herself to be more compassionate. She and her little brother Charles live with their aunt. Her father was a solider, killed in action in North Africa.
Charles comes over to join Esmè and X. When Esmè asks what X's job was before he became a soldier, he tells her that he'd like to consider himself a professional writer, but he has yet to be published, which he blames on American editors.
When X notices the "enormous-faced, chronographic-looking wristwatch" that Esmè is wearing, he asks if it belonged to her father. She says that it did and “I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime.”
She prefers stories about squalor. Before she leaves, Esmè offers to write letters to X, adding that "I write extremely articulate letters." He tells her that he'd love it if she wrote to him, and gives her his contact information.
The story flashes forward to V-E Day in 1945, as X tells his tale of personal squalor. He suffered a nervous breakdown from combat stress and is currently living in a "civilian home" for shell-shocked soldiers in Bavaria.
(After his own tour of duty, J.D. Salinger spent time in a mental hospital in Nuremberg following a nervous breakdown brought on by combat stress.)
X suffers from psychosomatic symptoms such as facial ticks and a badly shaking hand. He's gaunt, he can't sleep, and his friend Corporal Z says that he "looks like a corpse." Festivities are taking place in town, but X stays in his room.
He turns his attention to a pile of unopened letters by his writing table. Nauseous and trembling, X opens a letter. It's from Esmè. She apologizes for not writing sooner and asks if X is well, obviously worried about him. She also asks if he would write her back as soon as possible.
Enclosed in Esmè's letter is a note from her little brother Charles and a present - her father's wristwatch. X sits there for a while, contemplating the letter and the present, then "suddenly, almost ecstatically" feels sleepy - something he hasn't experienced in a long, long time.
For Esmè - with Love and Squalor was a huge hit. It would be included in Salinger's classic 1953 short story collection, Nine Stories. That year, the legendary English actor Sir Laurence Olivier asked Salinger for permission to adapt For Esmè - with Love and Squalor as a BBC radio play.
Salinger turned him down. When another one of his short stories, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, was adapted as a Hollywood feature film, the result was a critical and commercial failure that had little to do with the story upon which it was based.
Despite Hollywood's dogged determination to adapt his celebrated novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as a feature film, an irate Salinger vowed that no more adaptations of his works would be made - a vow he kept until he died in January of 2010 at the age of 91.
Quote Of The Day
"I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it." - J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, For Esmè - with Love and Squalor. Enjoy!
Happy New Year! The Internet Writing Workshop would like to wish all of its members and blog readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive new year in 2021! This Day In Literary History
On January 1st, 1919, the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger was born. He was born Jerome David Salinger in New York City. His mother Marie was Scotch-Irish, his father Sol was Polish-Jewish and earned his living by selling kosher cheese.
J.D. had an older sister, Doris, who died in 2001. His mother had changed her name to Miriam and passed herself off as Jewish. He would not learn of her true identity until after his bar mitzvah.
J.D. Salinger attended public schools until ninth grade, when he transferred to the private McBurney School. He acted in several school plays and showed a talent for drama, but his father was opposed to him becoming an actor.
Later, he entered the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania. There, he was able to get away from his overprotective mother. He had begun writing for the McBurney School newspaper; at the military academy, he wrote stories "under the covers [at night], with the aid of a flashlight."
In 1936, at the age of 17, Salinger entered New York University, where he considered studying special education, but he dropped out the following spring. His father wanted him to learn the meat-importing business.
So, he went to work for a company in Vienna, Austria. He spent only six months in Austria, leaving shortly before the country was annexed by Hitler in the spring of 1938.
After spending a semester at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, Salinger attended a writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, editor of Story magazine.
Burnett noted that Salinger was an average student at first, but then, about three weeks before the end of the second semester, "he suddenly came to life" and wrote three stories, all of which impressed Burnett. He praised Salinger's talent and accepted one of his stories, The Young Folks, for publication in Story magazine.
In 1941, Salinger met and began dating Oona O'Neill, the daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he found her to be a self-absorbed debutante, he fell in love with her. He called her often and wrote her long letters.
Unfortunately, their relationship ended when Oona began dating film legend Charlie Chaplin, whom she would later marry. That same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker magazine, which rejected seven of them.
However, in December of 1941, the magazine accepted Slight Rebellion Off Madison, a short story that introduced Salinger's most popular character - a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield, who had "pre-war jitters."
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the story was deemed unpublishable. It would not appear in The New Yorker until 1946. Several months after the Pearl Harbor attack, in the spring of 1942, J.D. Salinger was drafted into the U.S. Army.
He saw action with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge. During the Normandy campaign, he arranged to meet a fellow writer named Ernest Hemingway, who had influenced him and was working as a war correspondent in Paris.
Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, despite his gruff public persona. Hemingway was impressed with Salinger's writing, saying of the author, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two men began corresponding; Salinger would later say that his talks with Hemingway were among his few positive memories of the war.
As the war continued, Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his fluency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He would become one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp.
He later told his daughter, "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." The war would leave lifelong psychological scars on Salinger; he had to be hospitalized for combat stress for a few weeks after the defeat of Germany.
After he recovered, Salinger signed up for a six-month period of "denazification" duty in Germany. During this time, he fell in love with and married a German girl named Sylvia Welter. He brought her back with him to the U.S., but the marriage only lasted eight months, and Sylvia returned to Germany.
In the late 1940s, Salinger became a follower of Zen Buddhism, the first of many spiritual pursuits. He resumed his writing career, and in 1948, submitted a new story to The New Yorker titled A Perfect Day For Bananafish. The editors were so impressed with the story that they accepted it immediately and signed the author to a contract.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish was the first story that introduced Salinger's recurring characters, the troubled Glass family, consisting of two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children, Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Walker, Zooey, and Franny.
A Perfect Day For Bananafish featured Seymour Glass. On a second honeymoon with his wife Muriel, Seymour spends a day at the beach while Muriel remains in their hotel room, talking to her mother on the phone.
At the beach, Seymour meets and befriends Sybil Carpenter, a cute and inquisitive six-year-old girl. He enjoys her company and tells her a story about bananafish. Later, Seymour returns to his hotel room and finds his wife asleep. Removing a gun from his luggage, Seymour sits next to Muriel on the bed and blows his brains out.
Not long after the success of Bananafish, Salinger was approached by film producer Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to buy the rights to his earlier short story, Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut. Salinger immediately agreed, as Hollywood had shown interest in another of his stories, The Varoni Brothers, but nothing ever came of it.
Salinger hoped that Uncle Wiggily "would make a good movie," but when it was released as My Foolish Heart in 1949, the film proved to be a critical and commercial failure that had little to do with the story on which it was based.
A furious Salinger vowed that no more film adaptations of his work would be made - a vow he kept for the rest of his life, despite Hollywood's persistent interest in adapting his celebrated first novel, which was published in 1951, just a couple of years after the Uncle Wiggily film fiasco.
The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story, opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Holiden is an angry, alienated young man who may be losing his mind. He believes that his teachers and fellow students are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and gets assaulted by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy (based on a misinterpretation of Robert Burns' song Comin' Through The Rye) where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must make sure that they don't wander too close to the edge; he must become a "catcher in the rye."
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs.
Later that night, Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a "flitty" way. Whether or not this is a sexual advance is up for speculation and ultimately left to the reader to decide.
When Holden tells his little sister that he plans to move out West, Phoebe wants to go with him. He refuses to take her and she becomes upset, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
He watches with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel. He alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September.
That's just a bare outline of The Catcher In The Rye. You must read it for yourself. It truly is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It's also one of the most controversial.
The American Library Association (ALA) has listed it as the 13th most challenged book from 1990-2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005. The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy.
When high school English teachers assign the book to their classes, they are often met with protests from disgruntled parents and conservative activist groups who demand that the book be removed from both the teachers' assigned reading lists and the school libraries' shelves.
J.D. Salinger followed his famous novel with a short story collection, Nine Stories, (1953) which would include both A Perfect Day For Bananafish and another celebrated tale, For Esme - With Love And Squalor. The haunting, poingant story is narrated by an American Army officer known only as Staff Sergeant X.
While waiting to be sent into combat, Staff Sergeant X goes to an English tearoom, where a young teenage British girl named Esme approaches him and offers to write to him. He immediately agrees.
Thirty minutes later, Esme leaves, telling X "I hope you return with all your faculties intact." It's because of Esme's letter, which he receives on V.E. Day, that X, confined to a mental hospital for combat stress, is able to regain his faculties.
In 1955, Salinger married Claire Douglas, a Radcliffe student with whom he would have two children, Margaret and Matthew. He continued to write and publish short stories. In 1961, he published a short novel, Franny And Zooey, which originally appeared as two separate short stories in The New Yorker.
The book tells another story of the Glass family, narrated by Buddy Glass, who tells of how his sister Franny, a college student, has a Holden Caulfield-esque nervous breakdown while having lunch with her boyfriend Lane, troubled by the phoniness of her classmates and the egotism of the faculty.
At the request of their mother, Franny's brother Zooey helps her recover from her nervous breakdown through a long and intimate talk wherein he helps her sort out her personal and spiritual beliefs.
J.D. Salinger would continue to publish sporadically. In June of 1965, his last published work, a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the New Yorker. Afterward, at the age of 47, Salinger retired from writing, tired of all the media attention his novel The Catcher In The Rye continued to bring him.
He began to withdraw from public life. His last interview was given in 1980, after which, he became a recluse, appearing only to defend his privacy and his works in court. In 1986, British biographer Ian Hamilton planned to publish In Search of J.D. Salinger - A Writing Life (1935-65).
Salinger learned that the book contained a collection of letters that he'd written to friends and fellow authors. So, he sued to halt its publication. After two years of legal wrangling, the biography was published in a revised version, with the letters' contents paraphrased.
In 1995, Salinger had his lawyers block the American premiere of Pari, an unauthorized adaptation of Franny And Zooey by Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui. And in June of 2009, Salinger obtained an injunction to block the publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye.
The novel was an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher In The Rye, written by Swedish publisher Fredrik Colting under the pseudonym J.D. California. Colting filed an appeal, which resulted in a settlement in 2011.
As part of the settlement, Colting agreed not to publish his book in the U.S. and Canada until The Catcher In The Rye enters the public domain in those countries. He also agreed not to use the title Coming Through The Rye.
In 1999, Salinger's daughter Margaret published a memoir, Dream Catcher, where she depicted her father as a control freak who exerted harrowing control over her mother and suffered from severe post traumatic stress disorder all his life.
Margaret claimed that Salinger maintained his service haircut, wore his Army jacket, and drove around his estate (and town) in an old Jeep. She dispelled the Salinger myths established by Ian Hamilton in his book.
She also discussed her father's passion for films; despite his negative experiences with Hollywood studios, Salinger was a huge film buff and owned a large collection of 16mm film prints.
A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret Salinger's brother Matthew wrote a letter to the New York Observer denouncing his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood" and discrediting her memoir.
J.D. Salinger died in 2010 at the age of 91. His classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye, may finally be adapted as a feature film; in a letter written in 1957, Salinger stated that he would be open to an adaptation after his death as a means of providing for his widow and children.
Four years after Salinger's death, a collection of three of his early stories was published. It was followed in 2018 by a Centennial Edition boxed set comprised of four deluxe hardcover editions containing all the writings Salinger published during his lifetime.
A collection of his unpublished works is expected to be released as well.
Quote Of The Day "You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it." - J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, The Laughing Man. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On July 16th, 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, the classic novel by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published. Salinger's poignant coming-of-age story opens with teenage student Holden Caulfield being expelled from Pencey Prep, his boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Highly intelligent but mentally disturbed, the angry, alienated Holden believes that his fellow students and his teachers are all a bunch of phonies. After an altercation with his roommate, Holden packs up and leaves school in the middle of the night.
He takes a train back to New York City, but doesn't want to go home to his parents, so he checks into the shabby Edmont Hotel instead. There, he dances with some tourist girls, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, and is beaten by her pimp when he refuses to pay her more than the agreed upon amount.
Holden spends the next two days wandering around the city, drunk and lonely. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they're out so he can visit his precocious ten-year-old little sister Phoebe - the only family member that he can communicate with.
He shares with her a fantasy (a misinterpretation of Robert Burns' Comin' Through The Rye) where he watches over children playing in a rye field near the edge of a cliff. He must make sure that they don't wander too close to the edge; he must become a "catcher in the rye" and protect them from falling off the cliff.
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden visits his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who offers him a place to sleep and gives him a speech about life - while guzzling highballs. He compliments Holden's good looks.
Later that night, Holden is awakened to find Mr. Antolini stroking his head in a "flitty" way. Holden describes this as "something perverty." Mr. Antolini's marriage may be a sham to conceal his true nature.
When Holden tells Phoebe that he plans to move out West, she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, which upsets her greatly, so he tells her that he won't move. The book ends with Holden taking Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo.
Watching with melancholy joy while she rides the carousel, he alludes to possible future events, including "getting sick" and being committed to a mental hospital, and attending another school in September. That's just a bare outline of The Catcher in the Rye.
You must read this novel for yourself. One of the greatest American novels of the 20th century and one of the most controversial, the American Library Association (ALA) has listed it as the 13th most challenged book from 1990 to 2000 and one of the ten most challenged books of 2005.
The complaints range from profanity - including words such as goddamn and fuck - to blasphemy. Opponents of the book have also complained about the undermining of family values - Holden Caulfield being a poor role model who promotes rebellion, smoking, drinking, lying, and promiscuity.
In 1989, Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher in Boron, California, was fired after some disgruntled parents complained about her placement of The Catcher in the Rye on her students' assigned reading list. She was later reinstated.
Throughout his life, J.D. Salinger rebuffed attempts at adapting his classic novel for the stage and screen. When his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was adapted as a film called My Foolish Heart, great liberties were taken, and the film bore little resemblance to Salinger's story.
The movie, which Salinger hated, turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. He vowed that no more of his works would be adapted. In 1961, Salinger denied legendary film and stage director Elia Kazan permission to adapt The Catcher in the Rye as a Broadway play.
Acclaimed filmmakers from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg expressed great interest in directing a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, and many famous actors have expressed great interest in playing Holden Caulfield.
Big name actors from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have coveted the role of Salinger's antihero. John Cusack said that after he turned 21, he regretted that he had become too old to play Holden.
Ever since J.D. Salinger died in January of 2010 at the age of 91, speculation has run rampant that a feature film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye will finally be made. Until then, everyone should read the novel, which is one of the all-time classic works of literature.
Quote Of The Day “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.” - J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a complete reading of J.D. Salinger's classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye. Enjoy!
This Day In Literary History
On April 8th, 1950, For Esmè - with Love and Squalor, the classic short story by the legendary American writer J.D. Salinger, was published in The New Yorker.
Set during World War II and based in part on the author's own experiences during the conflict, the story's narrator is an American ex-soldier who refers to himself as Staff Sergeant X.
It opens with X receiving an invitation to a wedding in England. He wants to go, but he can't because his mother-in-law is coming to visit at that time. So, he decides to make "a few revealing notes about the bride as I knew her almost six years ago."
The story then flashes back to Devon, England, circa 1944, where X is stationed along with some 60 other American soldiers as part of a secret three-week training program for an upcoming invasion - the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
On his last day of training, after packing his bags, X takes a final walk through Devon and ends up at a church where a children's choir practice is taking place. He finds himself entranced by the singing of one particular child.
She's a thirteen-year-old girl “with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house.” Hers is the “sweetest-sounding” voice, though she seems “bored with her own singing ability.”
X leaves the church. Later, he goes to a tea room, where he orders tea and cinnamon toast. The girl he'd seen singing at the church enters the room, along with a little boy and "an efficient looking woman." They sit a few tables down from him.
When the girl notices X staring at her, she gets up and walks over to him. She is surprised to see him at the tea room, because she "thought all Americans despised tea." X asks her if she'd like to join him, and she accepts the invitation.
As they engage in a conversation, the girl, whose name is Esmè, surprises X with her precociousness when she asks him if he goes “to that secret Intelligence school on the hill.” She also asks him if he's married.
Esmè describes herself as "a terribly cold person" and says that she's teaching herself to be more compassionate. She and her little brother Charles live with their aunt. Her father was a solider, killed in action in North Africa.
Charles comes over to join Esmè and X. When Esmè asks what X's job was before he became a soldier, he tells her that he'd like to consider himself a professional writer, but he has yet to be published, which he blames on American editors.
When X notices the "enormous-faced, chronographic-looking wristwatch" that Esmè is wearing, he asks if it belonged to her father. She says that it did and “I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime.”
She prefers stories about squalor. Before she leaves, Esmè offers to write letters to X, adding that "I write extremely articulate letters." He tells her that he'd love it if she wrote to him, and gives her his contact information.
The story flashes forward to V-E Day in 1945, as X tells his tale of personal squalor. He suffered a nervous breakdown from combat stress and is currently living in a "civilian home" for shell-shocked soldiers in Bavaria.
(After his own tour of duty, J.D. Salinger spent time in a mental hospital in Nuremberg following a nervous breakdown brought on by combat stress.)
X suffers from psychosomatic symptoms such as facial ticks and a badly shaking hand. He's gaunt, he can't sleep, and his friend Corporal Z says that he "looks like a corpse." Festivities are taking place in town, but X stays in his room.
He turns his attention to a pile of unopened letters by his writing table. Nauseous and trembling, X opens a letter. It's from Esmè. She apologizes for not writing sooner and asks if X is well, obviously worried about him. She also asks if he would write her back as soon as possible.
Enclosed in Esmè's letter is a note from her little brother Charles and a present - her father's wristwatch. X sits there for a while, contemplating the letter and the present, then "suddenly, almost ecstatically" feels sleepy - something he hasn't experienced in a long, long time.
For Esmè - with Love and Squalor was a huge hit. It would be included in Salinger's classic 1953 short story collection, Nine Stories. That year, the legendary English actor Sir Laurence Olivier asked Salinger for permission to adapt For Esmè - with Love and Squalor as a BBC radio play.
Salinger turned him down. When another one of his short stories, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, was adapted as a Hollywood feature film, the result was a critical and commercial failure that had little to do with the story upon which it was based.
Despite Hollywood's dogged determination to adapt his celebrated novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) as a feature film, an irate Salinger vowed that no more adaptations of his works would be made - a vow he kept until he died in January of 2010 at the age of 91.
Quote Of The Day
"I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it." - J.D. Salinger
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a short film adaptation of J.D. Salinger's classic short story, For Esmè - with Love and Squalor. Enjoy!
The Internet Writing Workshop has monitored critique groups for fiction, nonfiction, novels, romance, short prose, poetry, scriptwriting, and practice writing. Each have participation requirements. The IWW also has groups discussing the art and craft of writing in general, creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, and marketing. The IWW is a cooperative. Membership is free.
The Disclaimer ...
Neither the IWW as a group nor any of its volunteer administrators individually take any responsibility for the accuracy or the integrity of any links listed here or on The Internet Writing Workshop's Web page. The links are shown as a convenience. Posts are the responsibility of the individual poster.
