Thursday, January 28, 2010

J. D. Salinger, Enigmatic Author, Dies at 91


From the NY Times
J. D. Salinger, the obsessively private author who captured the hearts of several generations with his pitch-perfect knowledge of adolescence and his ear for the vernacular, died on Jan. 28. "The Catcher in the Rye" is his best-known work.

Mr. Salinger, who was born on Jan. 1, 1919 in Manhattan, has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish. N.H. for more than half a century. He has not been photographed in decades.

Mr. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" caused a sensation when it was published. With its very first sentence, the book, which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. "Nine Stories," published in 1953, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. "Franny and Zooey," a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction," appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger's to appear in print was "Hapworth 16, 1924," a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. The story, which came out in book form in 1997, continued, and perhaps even

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