JD Salinger, who shocked one generation and inspired another with a classic novel of teenage rebellion, has died at home in New Hampshire, aged 91.
The writer, who avoided publicity and did not publish an original work over the past 45 years, was the creator of Holden Caulfield, the delinquent, alienated antihero of The Catcher in the Rye, which became required reading for generations of teenagers after its publication in 1951.
But in recent years his reputation was tarnished by two accounts, one by a former lover and the other by one of Salinger’s daughters, who painted him as a controlling and unpleasant eccentric.
The Catcher in the Rye was praised by the New York Times on publication as “an unusually brilliant first novel”. But while an instant hit with many, who related to its tale of adolescent angst and adult hypocrisy, it was met with alarm in other quarters. Some school boards made it required reading. Others banned it amid protests from parents over swearing — including the frequent use of “goddam” and, more rarely, “fuck” — as well as the bad example they believed Caulfield set.
Four years after the novel’s publication, Salinger expressed disappointment that the book, which he acknowledged was based on his own upbringing, had met with some hostility.
“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,” he wrote in 20th Century Authors. “It’s almost unbearable to me to realise that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.”
John Lennon’s murderer, Mark Chapman, cited The Catcher in the Rye as an inspiration for the killing in 1980.
Salinger published other books, including the well-received Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey, before he became an almost total recluse. His last published work, Hapworth 16, 1924, was printed in the New Yorker in 1965.
Ten years ago, it was revealed that Salinger had a secret cache of about 15 novels which had never been published. In his last interview, in 1980, he said that he wrote only for himself.
His literary agent Phyllis Westberg declined to comment on Thursday night on whether the novels still exist, or are likely to be published.
In 1986, Salinger won an injunction against the publication of a collection of his letters. During the case, which went to the US Supreme Court, he was asked what he had been working on for the previous 20 years. “Just a work of fiction,” he said. “That’s all. That’s the only description I can really give it … It’s almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.”
Troubled history
Salinger was born in New York on New Year’s Day 1919. His father, of Polish Jewish origin, became wealthy importing cheese and meat; his mother posed as Jewish, and he did not find out that she was not until after his barmitzvah. He had his own troubled history in various schools until he was dispatched at 15 to Valley Forge military academy. There he began writing at night using a torch under his bed covers and published his first story in a fiction magazine in 1940.
He submitted a number of stories to the New Yorker which were rejected, including one called I Went to School With Adolf Hitler. But the magazine did accept a later story about a disaffected teenager called Holden Caulfield, the first time the character appeared.
In 1942 he was conscripted to fight in World War II and took part in the Normandy landings. He married a German woman while serving with the occupation forces after the defeat of Hitler. They moved to America but the marriage fell apart. Salinger took up Zen Buddhism.
He found fame disagreeable, and the year after the publication of his most famous novel he left New York City for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There he remarried, to Claire Douglas, had two children, and then divorced in 1967.
In 1998, the writer Joyce Maynard published an account of her eight-month affair with Salinger in which she described his controlling personality. Two years later, one of his daughters, Margaret, wrote that he was a recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues. – guardian.co.uk