Why is j.d. salinger important

Life as the daughter of the famous author was bizarre — not least because he would lecture her at length on the correct way to chew food. Although Salinger had resented being sent away during his childhood — he particularly detested his time at the Valley Forge Military Academy — he was unsympathetic when his daughter rang from her boarding school to plead for help when she was ill and lonely.

Salinger cut her short and instead sent her a subscription to The Christian Science Journal. Her book also details some of his weirder traits, including his belief in the therapeutic powers of his energy-capturing orgone box, his obsession with homeopathy and a fad he went through of drinking his own urine.

After eight months, she was unceremoniously dumped. Maynard, who is now 65, said in an interview in September that she had been vilified for her revelations. She said she hoped the MeToo movement would allow her story to be seen in a different light. His second wife Claire also declined to write a book about her life with Salinger and his interest in strange philosophies, including one that suggested that women were impure.

His obsessions took a toll on Claire, who divorced him in After that, we lost touch. A better image of Salinger comes through the 50 letters and four postcards he sent to Londoner Donald Hartog from to Salinger met Hartog in , when they were both 18 and studying German in Vienna, and they remained lifelong friends.

Salinger wrote to his friend describing his life in more everyday terms. He also liked to relax by watching Marx Brothers and Alfred Hitchcock films and doing crossword puzzles. Salinger never spoke publicly about politics, but in this correspondence, he offered his private opinions of legislators.

They remained together for the final 22 years of his life, as he grew older, more infirm and very deaf. Salinger refused to wear a hearing aid and at the Railway Station restaurant where he ate regularly.

A waitress recalled that she used to have to write down instructions on a dry-wipe board he carried with him. The paranoia about unwanted visitors can only have increased after the events of The letters were bought by software millionaire Peter Norton, who returned the letters to the author. Salinger has not made an effort to limit the release of the book, unlike the Hamilton biography.

In a rumor surfaced that a Salinger story originally printed in the New Yorker in , "Hapworth 16, ," was soon to be released in book form. The publication is still planned but no date has been set. Today Salinger lives in seclusion in rural New Hampshire, writing for his own pleasure and presumably enjoying his private world. Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, Bloom, Harold, ed.

Salinger: Modern Critical Views. Chelsea House, Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. New York: Random House, Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press, Toggle navigation.

World Biography Ro-Sc J. Salinger Biography J. Yet nowhere is his influence in film felt more than the work of Wes Anderson. Despite the prospect of forthcoming titles, came and went and the world was left wanting. The J. Salinger Literary Trust was busy fighting a small publisher over foreign licensing rights for some old short stories, and any schedule for forthcoming Salinger books is still to be confirmed.

However, despite this absence, there remains abundant evidence of his influence in the contemporary world. Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. The mundane experiences of the disaffected Holden Caulfield are related in his own ironical voice speaking colloquially and directly to the reader with scarcely a word breaking character until close to the end, a stunning achievement whose style has been much copied.

The boy's droll critiques of all the "phonies" he runs across at school and at large have appealed to generations of alienated young people ever since. Salinger never published such a successful work again. The Nine Stories collection and Franny and Zooey published as a book in but actually having appeared as two pieces in The New Yorker in the mids were well received.

Writers have cited the stories as influencing their own styles. Franny and Zooey are also noteworthy for introducing some obscure religious notions, especially about continuous prayer, into Salinger's work. In Salinger's last book collected another two short novellas or long stories from the s. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is a meandering but engaging story of soldier-on-leave Buddy Glass hanging out with wedding guests after the bridegroom, his older brother Seymour, has failed to appear at the wedding.

Seymour: an Introduction is Buddy's denser, stream of consciousness riff on his sibling's early life, recounted after the events related in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and touching on Eastern religious ideas. This book too sold well, such was the hunger for anything from Salinger, though praise fell off with each publication since The Catcher in the Rye. The even more difficult "Hapworth 16, " was the last straw for readers and critics—and for Salinger. After the negative reaction, plans to reprint it were scrapped several times and it remains unpublished in book form.

Given the trajectory of his published work, it might be guessed that Salinger's private scribblings in the last five decades of his life descended further into self-referential, internal monologuing about the improbable Glass family and mysticism.