Jerome David Salinger, author of "Catcher in the Rye" and a handful of other stories, died a couple days ago, at 91. He was living in Cornish, NH, where he fled, in 1953, as soon as he made any money from writing. He bought 90 acres there and quit writing for the public.
It seems that he went on writing for some time after that, but he put his work away. We may never see those stories, but the ones that were published by Little Brown were amazing.
Mr. Salinger, as the New York Times would call him, was a favorite of mine. He's on my top shelf, along with Antoine de St. Exuperey, and T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Hemingway, Willa Cather, and a few other authors who meant something to me. I'm grateful to them.
I've never understood, nor has anyone else probably, why Jerry (or Sonny, as his close family called him) decided to keep things quiet after his initial success. I wonder if his experience investigating Nazis at the end of World War II had anything to do with it. Maybe it was as simple as the reason E.B. White, author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web and other good stuff, had. White wrote a letter to someone who had asked if he could visit. "Don't come. There are thousands of you and just one of me. Think about it."
The New York Times today published a story on
some of the places Salinger lived.
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Topic: J. D. Salinger, gone at 91 (Read 1548 times)