J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 in New York City. His parents were Sol and Marie Salinger.   He had an older sister named Doris. There is very little personal information about Salinger because of his insistence on protecting his privacy.
    J. D. earned average grades in grade school. At age thirteen, Salinger was enrolled in the prestigious McBurney School in Manhattan, but he was dismissed with failing grades after a year. He graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy.   This school was the model for The Catcher in the Rye's Pencey Prep.   There he wrote his first stories.   He attended Ursinus University in Pennsylvania, but dropped out in the middle of his first semester.   He instead took a course in short story writing at Columbia.
    In 1942, Salinger was drafted into the army.   He was a member of the Fourth Army Division that made D-Day famous.   After WWII, he was hospitalized in Germany for psychiatric treatment.   While in Germany, he met one of his heroes, Ernest Hemingway.   He returned to the U. S. in 1947.
    In 1951, Salinger's only full-length novel was published. However, it was the work that made him famous, and still sells some 250,000 copies annually. The novel took its title from a line by Robert Burns, in which the protagonist Holden Caulfied misquoting it sees himself as a 'catcher in the rye' who must keep the world's children from falling off 'some crazy cliff'. The ‘Catcher in the Rye’ is a story of a sixteen-year-old hero-narrator Holden Caulfield. He is full of despair and loneliness because of the "phony" post war era in which he is living. Knowing that he is about to be expelled from prep school for poor grades, Holden decides to run away just before Christmas. He spends the next few days wandering in New York City, describing in a mixture of schoolboy slang and poetry, his feelings about himself, his family, the world that surrounds him, and his quest for the true, the good, the real, and the innocent. Holden is...