Sayonara Salinger

[s1m0n]

Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger dies

J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose The Catcher in the Rye shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.

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

[...]

In 1999, New Hampshire neighbour Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home.

I wonder if they really exist, and if they'll ever see the light of day.

[PJ]

Sad news.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/bre ... king71.htm

[chas]

Poor Uncle Wiggly.

[jim stone]

I was 20 years old in 1962. I started college in 1958.
I can't express how much Sallinger's book and stories
meant to us. It represented the beginning of something new in our lives
that we didn't much understand at the time. We all dressed the same,
thought the same. Moral and political views were out. I was warned by my family,
'If anybody ever comes up to you with a petition, don't sign it! Even if you
believe it. You'll never work again!'

At the University of Vermont it was required that all female students be in
by 10 PM. Awful things happened if you were even a couple of minutes
late. Kids routinely died in car wrecks racing back to make it in
by hours. In 1959 a friend of mine in her senior year fell asleep in her boyfriend's bed
off campus and returned
to the dorm at 3 AM. For this a student court sentenced her
for the rest of the year, to either be in her dorm, in class, the library, in
the cafeteria, or in transit between these places. Otherwise she
would be expelled. She complied so as to graduate.

To graduate all male students at UVM had to pass two years of ROTC. It was never plain why this was required
and anyhow I was a lousy soldier, couldn't take apart the 45 caliber machine gun
on my desk, etc. So I transferred since I couldn't graduate.

Power was always used dishonestly, always in the service of somebody trying to stifle
just criticism, never for a benevolent purpose. Always we were lied to. And we conformed, crewcuts,
pants with a buckle in the back. In four years of university the only political
view I ever heard expressed by a collection of students was that we should
be able to have beer on campus.

Each year the main event was Cakewalk, where fraternities entered competing teams
of two dancers who, in spats, tuxs and blackface, did an elaborate high-kicking
Negro dance to recorded minstrel music.

In 'The Catcher in the Rye' we heard the branch beginning to creak. The impossible
meaningless utterly dishonest social order was beginning to die.

Then I guess we realized there were more of us than there
were of anybody else. In 1964 I was arrested three times in civil rights demonstrations
and sentenced to three months in jail. Students at the University of
Washington burned down the ROTC building. Protesters at Berkeley
said, and rightly: 'Don't trust anyone over thirty.' And it was over!

I never looked back, except in horror. Thanks, JD.

[crookedtune]

I never thought he was a goddam phony.

[jsluder]

The Onion has an inspired obituary: Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

[dwest]

Never read anything he wrote, but it didn't keep me from feeling sorry for him. He was a perfect example of the old saying, "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

[PJ]

Never read anything he wrote ...

A few years ago I found a copy of Nine Stories in a thrift store. I mush have read it 20 times. I must have ready "Teddy" 50 times. Amazing value for $1.

[Nanohedron]

Never read anything he wrote ...

A few years ago I found a copy of Nine Stories in a thrift store. I mush have read it 20 times. I must have ready "Teddy" 50 times. Amazing value for $1.

Just a couple of months ago I was lent a copy of Nine Stories. It was the first time I'd read Salinger at all.

I guesstimate there's about a ten-year difference or so between Jim Stone and me in age, myself to the junior side. I notice that for Jim, Salinger's stuff was revolutionary, but for me (especially remembering at this late time my mindset of an earlier day, the basics of which don't seem to be all that different between then and now), it proved for me merely a series of highly irritating vignettes of people living out their dull self-absorbed venalities in a society that seemed to have no point, no edification, and I knew the vestiges of that society back in the day. And it strikes me that this was entirely the point of the stories: the banging against the cage. Looking back, I think the difference was that for me the pointlessness was self-evident and already history, and the characters not just fiction, but still living and breathing, right next door, even, and an example of How Not To Be; but by that time for reading material my compatriots had already abandoned the harsh gritty light of Salinger for the dreams of Tolkien and filtered light of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. What a difference a decade makes.

[dwest]

We was more interested in Hesse in the early sixties.

[Nanohedron]

And let's not forget R. Crumb.

[talasiga]

I was 20 years old in 1962. I started college in 1958.
I can't express how much [Salinger's] book and stories
meant to us. ......................
........
Thanks, JD.

I think I am going to have to read it again.
I was only 10 years old in 1962.
The book was required reading for us in 1969/70
but I do not recall whether I wrote an examination essay on it.

I just remember it as a book about seedy American youth in a seedy society.
As I said, I am going to have to read it again.

There was another book by Henry Miller, I think, in which a bansuri player was mentioned being murdered in America by one of his neighbours.

It changed my life. I never play bansuri in apartments, not alone anyway.

[brewerpaul]

Only Salinger I ever read was Catcher around age 11 or 12 ('61-'62). I remember liking it, and the fact that it was the first time I'd ever seen the "f-word" in legitimate print.
I re-read it about 2 years ago and didn't care for it quite as much.
Guess I oughta see what the local library has by Salinger and try some more.