Los Angeles Times | Jan. 28, 2010 | 10:17 a.m.

"Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger dies at 91

The author's son, in a statement from the author's literary representative, says Salinger died of natural causes at his home. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in a small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye" with its immortal teenage protagonist -- the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield -- came out in 1951 during the time of anxious, Cold War conformity.

Salinger wrote for adults, but teenagers all over the world identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy.

In later years, Salinger become famous for not wanting to be famous, refusing interviews.

More soon at: http://www.latimes.com

'Catcher In The Rye' Author J.D. Salinger Dies

by The Associated Press
J.D. Salinger essentially wrote two achingly brilliant novels, then quit.
AP

January 28, 2010

"Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger has died at age 91 in New Hampshire.

The author's son, in a statement from the author's literary representative, says Salinger died of natural causes at his home. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye" with its immortal teenage protagonist - the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield - came out in 1951 during the time of anxious, Cold War conformity.

Salinger wrote for adults, but teenagers all over the world identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy.

In later years, Salinger become famous for not wanting to be famous, refusing interviews.

'Catcher In The Rye' Author J.D. Salinger Dies

by The Associated Press
J.D. Salinger essentially wrote two achingly brilliant novels, then quit.
AP

January 28, 2010

"Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger has died at age 91 in New Hampshire.

The author's son, in a statement from the author's literary representative, says Salinger died of natural causes at his home. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye" with its immortal teenage protagonist - the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield - came out in 1951 during the time of anxious, Cold War conformity.

Salinger wrote for adults, but teenagers all over the world identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy.

In later years, Salinger become famous for not wanting to be famous, refusing interviews.

(CNN) -- J.D. Salinger, author of "The Catcher in the Rye" and other books, has died, according to his literary agent, Phyllis Westberg.
The author died Wednesday at age 91 of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire, according to a family statement that Westberg provided Thursday.
"Despite having broken his hip in May, his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year," the statement said. "He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death."
Salinger has long been known for his reclusiveness, and "in keeping with his life long, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy there will be no service," the statement said.
"The family asks that people's respect for him, his work, and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time."
The author has written other novels and stories, but "The Catcher in the Rye" is considered one of the great American novels of the 20th century, a classic about a cynical and alienated young man named Holden Caulfield.
"Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it. His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters," the statement said.
"He will be missed by the few he was close to every bit as much as by the readers who loved reading him."

To Have and to Holden

Vanity Fair's Claire Howorth marks the cycling into the next stage of karma* of J. D. Salinger, whose monastic multi-decade silence is almost as impressive as the humor, stagecraft, pathos, and deceptively offhand durability of his fiction. Although I was hit as hard by The Catcher in the Rye as any teenager (never mind identifying with Holden--Catcher molded my expectations of what Manhattan would be like more than any other novel or movie, its evocative wintriness entering my bones and making days and nights like this feel like familiar friends), it's the "Franny" half of Franny & Zooey that I return to whenever I need a literary pick-me-up as a marvel and model of prose fiction where everything hangs just right. How perfectly Salinger captures the fond warbling of the campus intellectual in mating season.

His conversational trend and self-induced trance interrupted when Franny asks, "You going to eat your olive, or what?"

Nobody was better at writing scenes than Salinger, this intricate sense of give and take, pause and puff (he was the Jerome Robbins of cigarette-prop choreography), disappearing from his fiction when mysticism moved in and set up its tents. His last novella, "Hapworth 16,1924," is a reliquary of precocious dithery-do and a circular dead end, a melancholy feat of showing-off. Then he unplugged the microphone and retained radio silence until his death. That took some impressive discipline on his part, but the Great Depression/WWII generation of writers were a tough breed, and Salinger managed to outlive nearly everybody, a ghostly survivor with nothing left to prove.

*Given Salinger's deep-sea interest in Zen Buddhism, I intend no impiety.

Salinger's neighbors protected him

By SUSAN J. BOUTWELL and ALEX HANSON VALLEY NEWS - Published: January 29, 2010

CORNISH, N.H. — J.D. Salinger was grateful for the "protective envelope" he was given by neighbors here, his wife, Colleen Salinger, said on Wednesday.

"Cornish is a truly remarkable place. This beautiful spot afforded my husband a place of awayness from the world. The people of this town protected him and his right to his privacy for many years. I hope, and believe, they will do the same for me," Colleen Salinger, also known locally as Colleen O'Neill, wrote in an e-mail Wednesday to the Valley News.

For more than five decades, the author's neighbors and friends hid his whereabouts from what Cornish resident Peter Burling called "the annual parade of English majors."

It was "one of the most enjoyable municipal conspiracies ever, how to keep everyone guessing where Jerry Salinger lived," said Burling, who for 44 years has lived several doors from Salinger's Lang Road home.

"You very quickly got kind of wrapped up in the joke of it all. They were all so desperate to see if they could talk to the great man," he said.

Few of them — from away — actually did.

A favorite pastime at Cornish General Store, in Cornish Flat, was sending people searching for Salinger out into the weeds.

"I never told where he lived," Mike Ackerman, a 42-year-old Cornish native who's run the store for two years, said yesterday. The directions given to Salinger-seekers varied, he said.

"It really depended on the attitude of the person coming in how much fun we would have with that person," said Ackerman, who met Salinger when he was working for UPS and delivered packages to the author's house.

The first time he delivered there, he saw Salinger coming to the door, left the package and waved as he walked away. The next time and subsequently, they would chat for a few minutes, Ackerman said.

"He was the type of individual where, if you treated him like he was everyone else, he would tend to open up a bit," Ackerman said. "A very nice guy."

None of his local friends know why Salinger had picked Cornish as his refuge. But they do know he made a life just like theirs, filled with the same routines.

Over the years, people saw him at the movies at Dartmouth College, reading at Hanover's Howe Library, coming out of a voting booth at Cornish elections and swimming in Lake Runnemede in Windsor, where he used to attend Christmas parties thrown by Fannie Cox, mother of Archibald Cox who went on to become the special Watergate prosecutor fired in 1973 on orders from Richard Nixon.

The Cox family and their cousins, the Evarts, lived in the grand houses that line Windsor's North Main Street.

"This was exactly the type of party that Holden Caulfield would hate," said Windsor resident Joyce Burrington Pierce, who, with her girlfriends, struck up a friendship with Salinger in the early 1950s, shortly after Salinger had made Holden famous in "The Catcher in the Rye."

Salinger shopped for food in Windsor, where as a young man he would do his banking, pick up his mail, then cross the street to buy The New York Times and stop in at the old Knapp's Lunch for coffee.

Pierce was a 19-year-old Windsor High graduate back in the days when Salinger would drive into town in his little Hillman sports car, his pet schnauzer riding in the back.

Salinger would visit with the Windsor teens, watching their high school football games, attending movies with them and inviting them to his house to listen to Billie Holliday records or play with his Ouija board, recalled Pierce.

"My father was a bit leery of us spending so much time with him. He'd say, 'You girls are going to end up in a book,'" Pierce said. "I read all of his stories looking for me."

Until last year, Salinger was a regular at the Hartland Congregational Church's roast beef suppers, arriving more than two hours early for the first seating.

He would bring along back issues of the Times and sit with other, mostly older, early birds waiting for the doors to open so he could claim the same seat at the head of the table nearest the pie rack.

"No one ever bothered him at the suppers," said former pastor Bob Moyer of Hartland. "I think many, many people knew exactly who he was. Had he been bothered, I don't think he would have returned."

Salinger's health had declined after the new year, according to a statement yesterday from his New York City agent, Harold Ober Associates Inc.

Yet he was still able to enjoyed the Hartland church fare as his wife stopped by the last two Saturdays to purchase roast beef, mashed potatoes and cole slaw to bring home to Cornish, said Larry Frazer, one of the meal's organizers.

"I just said to my wife, 'We've lost a regular,'" Frazer said yesterday.

The Ober press release said Salinger had been in excellent health, even after suffering a broken hip last May, until a "rather sudden decline" this month.

"He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death," said the release, adding that there would be no funeral service for Salinger. He died at home, of natural causes, the release said.

As word of Salinger's death spread yesterday, residents were still closing ranks around him.

"I think I don't have anything to contribute," said a genial older man who came to the door at the home nearest Salinger's. The man smiled and pressed his hands together as he refused to talk about his neighbor, as if he was carrying out a cherished responsibility.

Most of the homes on Salinger's rural road, about a mile off Route 12A, were dark yesterday afternoon, their owners either at work or away.

Just around the corner, on Dodge Road, Benjamin Ober and Erika Argersinger were walking with their dog. The couple moved to Cornish from Washington, D.C., last summer, and had never encountered Salinger.

"I spent summers here," Ober said, "but I never met him."

Ober's mother, Marion MacKye Ober, has spent nearly every summer at the house on Dodge Road and met Salinger only once, when she was walking across his land. He was brusque at first, protective of his privacy.

"Once he knew that we had lived there and I had grown up there, we had no problem at all," Marion Ober said in a phone interview from her home in Arlington, Mass. "I'm really sad to hear" of Salinger's death.

Cornish Police Chief Doug Hackett said he and the three officers in his department are prepared to deal with anyone trespassing on Salinger's property, or to direct traffic in the days ahead if journalists and curiosity-seekers descend on the town of 1,600 residents.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Hackett said, no problems had arisen.

"Obviously, we're prepared for whatever happens, but we're hoping people allow the family to grieve in peace, and honor him the way he lived, which is quietly," the chief said.

Select Board Chairwoman Merilyn Bourne said residents treated Salinger "the way we'd behave with anyone who lived in town and wanted privacy."

"He was a citizen in our town and so you look out for one another," she said.

To Emily Robbins, Jerry and Colleen Salinger's house next door was a regular stop when she and her brother Nick were raising money for Cornish Elementary School projects or out trick or treating.

One year, the couple forgot to buy Halloween treats and instead handed out pencils.

"Well, this is lame," Robbins said she and Nick decided, once out of earshot.

Their mother, however told them, "Save those pencils."

Now an aspiring writer in a graduate program at UNH, Robbins kicks herself every time she thinks about the pencil she misplaced years ago.

But not everyone in the Upper Valley recognized the famous person in their midst, even when his name was shouted out.

Former CVS pharmacist Tony Furnari loved to tell of filling a prescription at the West Lebanon store some years back for Salinger, while Salinger waited. At the cash register, a teenage employee called out the names of customers when their prescriptions were ready.

"Sal-ling-grrr," the girl called, mispronouncing the famous name as the white-haired man paid for his drugs, then quietly shuffled off.

"Do you know who that was?" Furnari asked the teenager.

"No," she said.

"That was J.D. Salinger," the pharmacist said.

Several years ago, here at the Observer, we described JD Salinger as a writer who "seems to understand children as no English-speaking writer has done since Lewis Carroll", which sounds odd until you consider his career as a man, a writer, a literary icon and finally a celebrated, rather dotty recluse, breakfasting on frozen peas and drinking his own urine.

The first surprise about his passing must be his great age. Ninety-one! Here's someone, born on New Year's Day, 1919, who takes us back to the year Woodrow Wilson negotiated the postwar treaty that has, arguably, tormented the peace of the world ever since. Salinger's departure means that his nearest surviving contemporaries, the last of the Mohicans, are the youthful figures of Philip Roth (76) and Gore Vidal (84).

Much has been made of Salinger's New York childhood and the stories he wrote (and later disowned) before the outbreak of the second world war, especially "Slight Rebellion off Madison", a Manhattan story about a bolshy teenager named Holden Caulfield with "prewar" jitters, published just after Pearl Harbor in 1941. But it was Salinger's own war that seems to have perpetuated his adolescence, trapping him in the mind and spirit of a disaffected teen and subsequently sponsoring a deep yearning for solitude.

He was drafted into the army in 1942, along with millions of young American boys, saw combat at Utah Beach on D-day and also fought in the battle of the bulge. In Wartime, the distinguished critic, and veteran, Paul Fussell describes how young Americans who survived this brutal stage of the war became rapidly unfit for frontline service in a matter of weeks.

Salinger certainly suffered "battle fatigue", possibly a breakdown, having been one of the first to enter a liberated concentration camp. He told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." Holden Caulfield puts it in a slightly different way: "I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll swear to God I will." Several of the stories in For Esmι – with Love and Squalor draw on Salinger's wartime experiences.

I remember Norman Mailer, Salinger's junior by four years, and also a veteran, telling me shortly before he died that, for his generation of writers, literature became the great postwar project. America had come through, and triumphed, in a life-and-death struggle with a profound historical evil and now the republic could be cleansed and renewed through American letters. This, said Mailer, was the impulse behind The Naked and the Dead, the youthful novels of Gore Vidal, the launch of the Paris Review, and of course the immediate postwar fiction of JD Salinger whose career really took off with "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", first published in the New Yorker in 1948.

That was a turning point. "Bananafish" was the first of the stories to feature the Glass family, two retired vaudeville performers and their seven precocious children: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey and Franny. Salinger was not yet 30, but the local acclaim of New York critics was translating into a buzz around his name that would soon explode into a cacophony.

Now the creative and financial security afforded by the New Yorker encouraged Salinger to embark on the novel he had been incubating since 1940 and with which his name will be forever associated, the story of one boy's adventures in New York City, during a few days following his expulsion from an elite Pennsylvania boarding school. Salinger's celebrated first line echoed the author's angry, distracted, and solitary nature: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know etc" and it precisely recalls Huck Finn's equally famous: "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of…"

That nails The Catcher in the Rye as a classic American boys' book, by Twain, so to speak, out of Fitzgerald, whom Salinger admired, and Hemingway, whom he had met as a GI in France. As a boys' book it gets constantly rewritten, which is part of its hypnotic grip on the American imagination. Louis Menand, for example, says it is "a literary genre all its own". Among its "rewrites" he identifies Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984) and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Here, in Britain, the grumpy teens who stomp through the novels of Melvin Burgess and Jacqueline Wilson must also owe a debt, however remote, to Salinger.

Like Salinger, Holden Caulfield is obsessed with "the phoneys" of adult society and is questing in a cynical, discontented way in search of emotional honesty in a world of troubling privilege and comfort. In archetypal terms, he is the classic fish out of water. As an odd fish, Holden is acutely alert to what Joyce Carol Oates calls "the moral rootlessness of contemporary American materialism", which is probably why he has remained such an evergreen character. But he also revels – and this is also part of his appeal – in the wonderful angst that the American pursuit of happiness engenders. "Reading Catcher," says the New York Times, "used to be an essential rite of passage."

Back in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, which had been turned down by Harcourt Brace, struck an immediate chord with its readers, was reprinted eight times within two months of publication and was a New York Times bestseller for 30 weeks. Current newspaper estimates put the novel's sales at about 60m worldwide. It became the bible for the 60s generation of American schoolkids, the indispensable manual to brooding adolescence. Like Huckleberry Finn, it was censored, denounced, idolised and mythologised. Holden was compared to Billy Budd, Natty Bumppo, and Melville's Ishmael. Whatever the models and influences, the troubled life of Salinger's protagonist became tragically mirrored in the teenage traumas of some readers.

In 1980, Mark David Chapman was clutching a battered copy of Catcher in the Rye when he shot John Lennon. By then, Salinger had become "the Garbo of letters", living a fiercely defended private life in rural New Hampshire, a town named Cornish. To some, he seemed to be fulfilling Holden's desire to build himself "a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life" away from "any goddam stupid conversation with anybody".

As long ago as 1961, on the cover of his masterpiece Franny and Zooey, he had written: "It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years." Thereafter, for at least five decades, he dedicated himself to being invisible. His agent was told to burn the fan mail. Newspapers who tried to snatch a photo of the old man got short shrift. He was said to be working on a masterpiece, but no one had seen a line of it.

Salinger's last published work, "Hapworth 16, 1924", appeared in the New Yorker in 1965. From then on, it was the academics who became the bane of his life. There were moments of sanity. In 1974, Philip Roth wrote: "The response of college students to the work of JD Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times, but instead has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture."

Salinger certainly kept a beady eye on the commentators. In 1986 he used extreme legal sanctions to prevent the distinguished British poet and critic, Ian Hamilton, from publishing In Search of JD Salinger. In 1999, a former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, published a memoir of her relationship with the hermit of Cornish, At Home in the World. There was an ephemeral brouhaha, some tittering about the old boy's foibles (acupuncture; hours in an orgone box; an obsession with Vedanta Hinduism) and then silence descended once more.

Salinger, meanwhile, continued to write and write from day to day, following a monk-like routine. Others speculated that he was like Jack Torrance in The Shining, repetitively writing the same mad sentence again and again. Was he, asked the New York Times, "a crackpot or the American Tolstoy"? No one knows what, exactly, that legacy will amount to. His position in the American canon is secure, however, and rests on a slender collection of immortal stories and one enduring masterpiece of a novel whose garrulous anguish makes him, in the words of writer Gish Jen "the avatar of American authenticity", a boy for all seasons.